This blog is now on the fediverse. I wonder how it’ll turn out.

So: I’ve been on holiday. We’ve done literally thousands of miles across Europe, all by public transport. Well, mostly public. Public in that it’s available to the public, not that it’s necessarily owned by the public, y’know? Like public schools in the UK, which are – you know what? It doesn’t matter. We’ve travelled a long way by train, bus, waterbus, and ferry. We have avoided flying. That’s the long and the short.

It was categorically Too Much.

On our last day of travel we woke up at 4.30am because we thought we had to vacate our cabin at 5.30, when in fact we finally disembarked at 6.15. I managed to stay awake for another 6 hours, whereupon (somewhere around Rugby) I fell asleep and began snoring. I snored so loudly, I am reliably informed, that there has been an uptick in angry letters to local newspapers about drilling happening along the London-Manchester line.

By the way, being on a ferry was a weird experience. It’s Too Big. You get on a train and you can appreciate that it’s a complex machine that must have been put together by many brains, probably some machines. But you can basically comprehend it.

When we arrived at Hoek van Holland and saw the ship we’d be sailing home on, my jaw dropped. The closer you get the more ridiculous it is. It looks too big. It seems almost alien. You try to imagine the size of the building that produced the anchor, the rudder, the pieces that were put together to make something so big – and you fail. I’m trying to explain to you that I don’t have any frame of reference for this thing. I could guesstimate how many people could fit in a train. I can’t even guesstimate how tall this ship was in comparison to me.

I’m feeling that way as I review the trip that we did. We crossed thousands of miles. More miles that I have any kind of frame of reference for. We went away for 16 days and we saw 4 cities and we barely even scratched the surface of what there is to know and learn. There is no end to everything. The world is countably infinite.

(Luckily, the postal system is generally very good, and I have little friends I can write to when it all seems enormous)

Thankfully my project plan is only 3,000 words: both countable and finite. I’ve got until early January to get it finished, and all I need to do is prove that I know how to write a project plan. The most sensible approach is to plan the project I’ll need to complete to get the proper MSc, so that’s what I’m hoping to do. I need to have an outline finished in the next five weeks, so over the coming days I’ll be winnowing down my ideas about secure software, encrypted communications, and why people just love to ask things instead of reading.

I’m also back to work on Monday – I daren’t look at my inbox before then – and next week we’ve got a couple of theatre engagements which look like a lot of fun.

So for now: I hope this does reach your corner of the federated Internet.