La Latina

This bus is parked on the retail centre near to me, converted into a delicious latino cuisine restaurant run by a Colombian wife and Portuguese husband. The upstairs level has been converted into tables and seats upholstered with Latin American coffee sacks.

I met Milly, Felix and their three young kids there for some food. Milly is basically the first person I knew in Cambridge as she led on recruiting me in 2008. Before that we had also both worked for the same expedition company, albeit on different continents.

Fellow diners were subjected to much raucous behaviour from the kids and when they'd sprinted to the other end of the bus we were able to catch up. We discussed how the average person with average patience levels transitions into parenthood without completely losing their sh*t on an hourly basis.

It sounds like a) parents do completely lose it on occasion but that b) as a survival tactic the patience baseline is massively reset. This happens to mine when I'm overseas somewhere like South Sudan, where impatience achieves nothing, and actively works against you. Likewise Milly must invest energy calmly dealing with a tantrum about which kid is sitting on which seat, without throwing herself out of the top deck window of a bus. I say likewise about South Sudan, but kids there are happy to have any material possession, let alone the privilege of sitting on a seat.

When away from the kids and doing her own thing, Milly says her impatience levels rise again when things go wrong as her brain tells her these are the times when life should be easier. This is how my brain views time in South Sudan vs time in the UK, where I am much more critical. It's subconscious wiring of expectations that has gone wrong and we'd all be more zen if we a) meditated more and b) let things wash over us without immediately resorting to impatience.

The day was also filled with new flat-viewing in my block with Steph, shopping for homeware that is not needed with Victoria, drinking herbal tea and blowing my nose with Stefan, and having to cancel yoga again because last year when I went to a class with a cold at the end of it I fainted down the side of a wall.