Exhaustion outside the workhouse

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter.

I arrive at Heathrow, unrested. The electronic passport machine lets me into the UK and I wait, alone, at the baggage carousel for my bag full of Cheerios. It's only minimally crushed.

The Heathrow Express and the 23 bus get me to my mum's flat where the shower does its best to wake me up. London is hot and humid, but there's a stubborn refusal to rain. I Boris it across to Vine Hill, where we're planning to spend the day planning at the Featurist offices.

The place is a grubby, ground floor brace of rooms. Unloved. Unoccupied. The building next door is, apparently, the workhouse that inspired Dickens' Oliver Twist. Ryan's even more tired than me - he just flew in from Houston, without any sleep, having been seated seated next to two pensioners with IBS.

Anyway, we drink coffee and think divergently. Post-it notes are sacrificed to the greater corporate good. Finally, we check the boys into a grotty, top floor, industrial AirBNB in Shoreditch and I go back across town.

I stay awake, just, through a delightful supper with my mother and then fade away. I awake, overheated, a couple of hours later and set up a table fan at the bottom of my bed before passing back into unconsciousness accompanied by Melvyn Bragg and Pushkin.