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Our working day, while we were in Brazil, was dawn to dusk — about 5.30 am to 6 pm. We were up and out by 5.15 am, watching the light rush over the landscape, as it tends to do in the tropics (no languid, leisurely dawns there), then we headed to breakfast at about 6.30 am, feeling like we’d already accomplished something. Then there was the relatively cool, productive period until about 11 am, an agonising hour when our stomachs rumbled incessantly for lunch, followed by the flattening, oppressive heat of the early afternoon until about 3 pm. The final stretch from 3-6 pm was pleasant, gradually cooling, and with a lovely golden light cast on everything.

I mention this because I found it quite a pleasant way to work. There’s something just right about timing your working day to match the available light. You get a feeling of continuity as you watch the bats (which you saw leaving their roosts at the end of the previous day) returning from their night time foraging, and the cormorants and herons (which you saw coming back to their roosting trees the previous evening) leaving to start their day. Their activity synchronises with your activity, and after a bit of adjustment to the early start, you find that it sits very comfortably with the natural changes in your energy levels.

Of course, if you get up at 5 am, you have to go to bed at about 9 pm at the latest (though we rarely lasted past 8.30 pm), so it somewhat curtails your social life. And in temperate latitudes, your working day would oscillate wildly between unworkably short in winter, to exhaustingly long in mid-summer. Of course, this is how people used to work when their calendar was driven by the agricultural year, and artificial light was expensive and hard to come by. Explaining to your boss that you are late to work because it isn’t yet light is going to sound like the lamest of excuses now. But if I had more freedom to schedule my own day, I’d like to follow the periodicity of the natural day length more closely — I think that I’d have a lot more energy to spare.

It seems that I may have brought a little stowaway back with me from Brazil. A couple of weeks into the trip, I noticed that I had a small lump on the bottom of my left foot, between my big toe and second toe. That wasn’t very surprising, because I am — as I have said before — a mosquito magnet, and had gathered a impressive collection of bites by that time. However, this one seemed a bit different.

[Squeamish readers, please look away now.]

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I’m back. At least, I think I am. Brazil is such a huge country, and so far away from the UK that travelling from the centre of Brazil feels like an expedition in itself. I started back on Saturday, at 3pm local time, and didn’t get back to Birmingham until 1pm on Monday. There was the 20 hour bus ride, the hours of waiting at Sao Paulo airport, the 11 hour flight followed by another 1 hour 40 minute flight, and finally the taxi ride home.

Perhaps it was mostly tiredness and jet-lag, but I found that my senses got disconnected from one another. Like a group of tired children, they straggled along, getting out of synchronisation with one another. When I woke on the bus, sound roared in suddenly like a window opened on raging surf before sight and touch worked out where I was. On the flight, I realised that I had been staring at the back of the seat in front of me for several minutes after waking, seeing it, but not being aware of sound, touch or smell, or of thinking consciously about anything.

Bits of me kept getting left behind. I felt wide awake on the last part of my flight, then an intense, irresistible sleepiness ambushed me suddenly as we landed. Part of the problem, I think, is that long distance travel is done using stolen time, and there’s eventually a price to pay for that petty crime. On the plane, it’s night, but if you lift the window blinds slightly, you see fierce, shocking sunlight piling up against the glass, trying to burst the little bubble of time created by inter-continental flight. It finds you in the end.

I enjoy taking off. I like the burning roar of the engines, feeling the hand of acceleration pushing you firmly in the chest, pinning you to your seat. I like the sudden, gentle lurch as the wheels leave the ground, when you are falling and being lifted at the same time.

But it’s all disconnection, and I’m glad to be back with familiarity, slowly synchronising my senses again and re-setting my clock. I seem to be more or less all here.

It’s that time of year again when I have to pack my bags to go to Brazil for three weeks to teach a course. As usual, I haven’t got nearly as much organised before my departure as I’d hoped. I had planned to write a few articles to forward post here, but — well — that didn’t happen. Frankly, I’m amazed that I seem to have got things organised for the trip, but I’m paranoid that I’ve forgotten something vital. It all seems a bit too easy…

One thing that I set up before the trip last year, which has been immensely useful this year, is a kind of master packing list. I wrote a detailed list in OmniOutliner of everything I took (separated into checked baggage and hand baggage). Since I know that I travelled comfortably with those items last year, I can be fairly confident that if I pack those things again, all will be well. As with GTD, getting things out of your mind and into a ‘trusted system’ is a huge help. It basically stops you sitting bolt upright in bed at 3am and yelling “Torch!”, startling your partner in the process.

I leave on Sunday, and while Brazil will be — I am sure — as beautiful and wildlife-packed as usual, it’s going to be a tough three weeks. I’m also going to miss Mr. Bsag (and Cleo) like blazes - I’m hoping they’ll look after one another while I’m gone, but I’ll have to make do with a picture of both of them on my phone. It’s our seventh¹ wedding anniversary while I’m away, so we’re having a substitute celebration on Saturday. Roll on mid-September!

In the meantime, if something goes awry with the site in my absence, or gets swamped by spammers, I’m afraid that I won’t even know about it, still less do anything about it.

¹ Seven years! Shouldn’t we be itching, or something? ↑

Alan’s recent post about a crab spider reminded me that I never followed up on my promise to talk about Brazilian giant flattened spiders. True, I haven’t exactly been deafened by people wanting to hear the story, but since when did I write things that other people wanted to read? Despite the earlier billing, this spider wasn’t exactly giant, but it was big by the standards of British spiders. I should also say that, while I’m generally not frightened of spiders, invertebrates aren’t really my thing, and I don’t like spiders of unknown species and biting propensity creeping up on me¹.

My colleague and I had been working quietly on the balcony of the hotel room, when we suddenly saw this big, flat, grey, ghost-like spider. Our first instincts were solidly scientific — we took the photograph you see above, complete with carefully placed binoculars for scale (the diameter of the binocular is about 4cm). This was swiftly followed by a very non-scientific, big-girl’s-blouse moment when we flicked it gently but firmly off the balcony with a long ruler.

A few hours later, I turned my head slightly and saw the same species of spider (perhaps even the same individual, back for revenge!) a few centimetres behind my head, sitting on the wall of the chalet in the perfect position to hop onto my neck. Eeek. I didn’t scream, but I did move away from the wall fairly sharply. We stood at a safe distance and looked at the spider, speculating about its unusual flattened body plan, and coming to the unwelcome conclusion that it was perfectly adapted for slipping underneath closed doors. There followed a lot of activity in which ring binders, books and other stacks of paper where jammed into the gap under the closed door to form a spider exclusion zone. I spent the rest of the evening looking nervously over my shoulder at the spider on the wall, not sure whether I would be more relieved to find it still there (where I could see it), or gone to an unknown location.

Now that the memory is several months old — and the spider itself is safely several thousand kilometres away — I’d quite like to know what species it is, and whether I was worrying about nothing.

¹ Before anyone else points this out, yes, I do know that very few spiders will bite a human unless provoked or in imminent danger of death. It’s just that there’s something about a big, unfamiliar spider that tends to override this knowledge in a primeval way. ↑

[I meant to write about this experience in Brazil a while back but forgot, and it just came back to me again the other day.]

The heat and humidity are oppressive. I feel smothered by a thick, damp blanket, pressed to the earth by a heavy, enclosing hand. It’s too hot to move or even breathe, and the flat, grey clouds muffle any breeze. Even thought slows as I sit and stare.

Suddenly, there’s a basso rumble, felt more than heard. Surely it can’t be thunder? Then another low drum roll, closer now, and bringing with it a breath of wind like an exhalation, stirring the leaves. I stand up, willing the storm closer, knowing now why people used to dance to bring the rains. Come here, Storm, don’t pass us by. The pressure is immense as the storm builds, the wind lifting and tossing the tops of trees, everything is dancing wordlessly now—-Rain, come.

The wind stops abruptly and the giant’s hand is lifted. Fat, ripe, juicy raindrops explode on hot parched skin, detonating shivers of pleasure, waves of delicious coolness. I stand in the open, face turned to the sky, eyes closed, smiling, opening like a flower.