It's coming.

The week is ticking down now to a big weekend. The pages are completed daily, work is worked - with its myriad of successes and annoyances, and slowly the days are peeled away leading to Friday and adventure.

I love the sense of anticipation, it cuts through the fog of illness, rising in mountain peaks through the cloud line. Up here the air is bracing and fresh. You look down with renewed perspective, and a sense of awe as the range of possibilities stretch to the horizon in crags and spires, speckled in spacelight and absolute shadow. 

All the excitement makes today an interesting day. Wednesday, mid-week, the half way point between the fading of last weekend and the building of the next. Today is swimming in marmalade - the sweetness is oozing around me, but every now and then comes the sharpness of the bitter peel, and the tang of acidity. Movement is slowed, but effort is redoubled, knowing that it will get me through this sticky Time that cloys me to delay. 

Coupled to this is my reluctance to get carried away should I jinx the adventure with hope and expectation. My aim is to sneak my excitement through customs so that by the time it notices it is too late. So in the mean time I continue as normal, attempting to avoid mention or exuberance about what is to come. 

Thus I ensure the page is finished, I make my way to work on time, I do what I must do; but inside I am coiled and ready for a day I have long imagined. The experience is sweeter as it comes as a present from my wife and I get to share it with her. 

Again the voice of my inner pessimist (though this is wrong, for he sits upon my shoulder like a malicious parrot) whispers 'what ifs' of disaster and disappointment, tells tall tales of dreams that are destroyed by the drop to the ground. But I grab his beak and smother the noise. 

This time my natural predilection for doom is quelled by the knowledge that the adventure itself will make the weekend, and the experience will be what it is. Either way I will be with the person I love - that is the true adventure.