The other day I wanted to quote this paragraph from the book I'm just reading about a London expat lawyer in Moscow:

"I unwrapped the meat we'd bought in Moscow and slid the chunks on to impressively crusty skewers. I went outside with the barbecue and the charcoal. I stood on my own, tending the fire in the winter silence. It started to snow again, the wide weightless flakes sizzling on the coals. Standing there, I remember, I experienced the blissful sense of well-being that expats sometimes enjoy. I was a long way from things and people that I didn't want to think about - inlcuding myself, my old self, the so-what lawyer with the so-what life I'd left behind in London. The me that you know now. I was in a place where today, every day, almost anything might happen."

I felt it, too, that blissful sense. One day when I was standing on High Holborn and could hear the well-known bells of Big Ben. I thought, it was right I was there, on my own and that this will be a new era for me, that I would be differerent. I didn't get the chance to become different. I'm being put right back to where I came from. I'm heartbroken.