I’m simultaneously living in two countries at the moment. They’re very close to one another, so close that the merest shiver of the air would turn one into the other. This one, where I’m standing now, is the land where dreams very nearly come true. All the doors are open. I can see through them, and there are gardens and blue skies and chirruping birds. There’s a feast spread out, and I can smell the food, even have a tiny taste. But only a tiny one, just enough to show me that the food really is as delicious as it looks. When I decide, simply in the interests of sanity preservation, that the roses might be fake, there’s a little breath of wind, just to carry their scent to where I’m standing and prove that they’re real.

Oh I want to be there. To gather the roses, to plant my own. To say, yes, I walked here on these tired feet because I want to work, and I want to work here. I’ve brought my spade. I’ve moved in, and yet I’m not there. I’m standing in the middle of it, reaching out my arms, longing for that shimmer of air that will made the land where dreams almost come true into the land where they do.

There’s another land, of course. The land of school runs and homework and cooking meals and ironing and cheering at Sports Days and picking up prescriptions and chasing up the guarantee on the broken boiler and organising birthday parties and clearing up and tidying and nursing sick little ones and organising car insurance… We’re all there, and it never stops. But somehow, right now, that land seems the most unreal of all.

Wish me luck.