Hello. Good morning. I’ve got a funny nut to crack. I’ve been home for nearly ten days now. My plan is to continue to write these blogs from home. To live at home as clearly as I live when I’m away. It’s proving difficult, I’m not sure why. The words I wrote when I first got home, which follow this introduction, have been sitting unpublished since my first day back. In fact I thought I had deleted them. I somehow decided that they are not perfect, and would not let myself publish them. I have this sense of having a whole story to tell, and to reduce Estonia to a country of lawn mowers is absurd.

The thing I must remember is that I’m not perfect, however much I would wish myself to be. Also, I need to write this one before I can write the next one.

And thanks, Louise, for the nudge.

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I’m home. One of my sparrows just flew down from his nest in the air vent and landed on the plum tree. He landed in such a way that the sun shone on his white chin, making it very white, and the shade of a leaf made the top of his head appear black, and for a moment I saw my beloved pied flycatcher. I’m cute too, the sparrow seemed to say. Welcome home!

It is a joy to be home, to have a home to come to, so special and wonderful.

The garden has exploded. It is a magnificent natural combination of fruits and grasses and roses. I particularly love the grasses. One of the things I love about them is that I don’t know their names. I am beginning, very tentatively, to let go of naming things. I’m not very good at it at all, but I will start with the grasses. Just call them the flighty one, the soft one, the misty one (that’s probably Yorkshire fog!). I’ll touch each one with my cheek and say oh, yes, you’re that one, you’re that one.

All this beauty in my garden comes about from not using a lawn mower. That was one of the things I noticed in Estonia – they do a lot of lawn mowing. And Nick, as we drove past a particularly lawn mower mutilated garden, said That looks nice and tidy. I want to change our idea of nice and tidy. But it’s deeply ingrained in Estonia. One of the exhibits in the National Estonian Museum, to demonstrate the ingenuity of Estonian people in Soviet times, when there was nothing in the shops, was an electric lawn-mower made out of tin cans. I took a picture if it. Wuther, wuther.

I managed to create one last drama at Riga airport. I arrived super early, checked my baggage, dang! excess weight baggage fee! and went through security with my hand luggage easily and went to Costa and ordered a coffee and a piece of caramel shortbread and paid with the last of my change. I sat down to wait for it to be made. I checked my phone. Two missed calls from a Latvian number. Strange. I called the number back. It was the nice man from the car hire company. Where is the registration document? Oh. In my ruck sack? I checked. I still have it, I said. I need it, he said. But I’ve gone through security.

Being early has its benefits. I found the exit, went through the nothing to declare corridor, and was outside in a moment. I phoned the man and saw him answer his phone across the road. The same man who phoned me as I was sitting in Tesco’s car park in Petersfield on the morning of the first day of this trip to tell me that I had booked the car for ten a.m. and did I mean ten p.m.? I handed over the document, we shook hands, and my trip to the Baltics was rounded not with a sleep, but with a smile. I went back through security, I’m an expert now, and the Costa girl made me a fresh cup of coffee and I still had half an hour before boarding.

The flight was without incident, apart from my pen decompressing, with inky consequences, and after we landed I found my bag on the carousel before I started looking. I walked out to the railway station part of Gatwick, and smelt something delicious and tasty and English as I looked for the board to see what time my train was. I found I had half an hour to spare and I turned back to identify and purchase the tasty smelling food. It turned out to be a Cornish pasty. I bought one, and a bottle of water, and tucked it all into my bag and found my platform. I don’t eat on planes, so I was hungry. I found a seat and sat down and ate. It was very tasty.

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There. Done. Next one soon. From Chichester. Or maybe Lewes.