Day Four of This Week, and still nothing much has happened. I’ve had my hair done and it looks fairly alarming. It should quiet down by Saturday.

I wonder if I might not block the Princess this afternoon? I might find it calming.

In what follows, assume a DV or insh’Allah after every statement with a verb referring to the future. I won’t keep inserting them so as not to break the flow of the prose.

My husband’s train leaves at 12 noon. Lizzie’s, at the other end, doesn’t leave until 1. I’ll go up to the station with my husband this morning, and hang around until I see the wheels turning. Then come back and have a light, carefully chosen lunch with a bottle of nicely chilled cider. (Regimes don’t count this week – and anyway, I can’t drink all that much because they don’t have Weston’s Vintage Cider in CT. I hope to drink a lot of champagne, but that is famously low-calorie, the drink of jockeys.)

That leaves several hours before I go back up to the station to meet Lizzie. I need to pack, but everything has been laid out, lists made, telephone numbers noted.

Janet asked what books I’m taking: the new Kate Atkinson, “When Will There Be Good News”; Eudora Welty’s “Delta Wedding”; something about Schrodinger’s cat; and Julian Barnes, “Nothing to be Frightened Of”, about death.

The cat book is to get me up to speed on quantum mechanics and string theory. Examining it more closely after I got it back from the bookstore, I was surprised to find that it is a couple of decades old. That might mean it’s readable. I hope so. My own knowledge of physics is a good five decades old, anyway.

Professor Higgs (of “Higgs besom” fame) used to live in Drummond Place. And James Clerk Maxwell lived not all that far away, although in a different century. Why is he not as famous as Newton and Einstein, between whom he stands? I suppose because his achievements are utterly incomprehensible, whereas we can all grasp the fall of an apple and the evaporation of a city.

Lizzie and I will have hours and hours in Newark airport on the way home next Monday so I should have time to get through all that, and start again.