The Pull of Maverick Energy.

I kept feeling an inner conviction tonight that the current life doesn’t last forever, and that maybe I should blow what little capital I have on a trip to New York. It would only need to be a short one – just enough to call into the Met, and then go to Tea and Sympathy for a cronut and coffee – and so I googled ‘package trips to New York.’ I found several listed on the BA website that looked pretty reasonable, and so I clicked ‘book.’

I clicked ‘book.’ Imagine that.

My mind had fallen into that invisible maelstrom where you find yourself being dragged along by some insidious form of energy that has no truck with reason or caution. The voice crying plaintively ‘you shouldn’t be doing this’ is weak and distant, while the one intoning ‘don’t be a wimp, just get on with it’ seems irresistible. It’s pulled me through some irrational and injudicious doors a few times in my life and left me to deal with the consequences – which I suppose I always did, and the outcome was at least usually interesting.

Fortunately (or not, depending on how you look at it) I came to the page where they ask you to accept their cookies policy. I’m naturally reluctant to accept corporate policies on cookies or anything else they might dream up for their corporate benefit, and that brought me to my senses. I closed the tab.

I’m not entirely glad that I did. There are other reasons for not taking the trip, you see, reasons that have more to do with conscience than cash, so maybe it was right that the voice of reason and caution should have prevailed. And yet I’m not wholly comfortable with the grey light of reason. It seems to me that I really have become a hobbit since moving to the Shire seven years ago, and that a trip to New York would be a bit like making the journey to Mount Doom to despatch the troublesome ring once and for all. Maybe not quite as hazardous, but you never know.

Still, there’s always tomorrow, isn’t there? Isn’t there? Oh no, that’s where I came in. One day there is no tomorrow.

Mmm…