This is my guest bedroom. It’s a lovely space. Only three people have slept here. Tonight will be the fourth.

Laura is a friend from the Evolutionary Collective. The group of us meet on Zoom. And Laura and I have never met … physically. Today at 11:00 am she’ll walk into the lobby of the Gent Sint-Pieters train station. I’ll be there.

Previously when I met people who I’d only talked to online, my first comment often was “You have legs!” Maybe the same today.

Laura will be here till Monday. I could be all proactive, armed with a list of things she must see. No thanks. She’ll survive quite nicely without walking the halls of Gravensteen castle.

There are places I love in Ghent and I can feel the pull of having Laura experience them too. Well … maybe not! We have a blank canvas of a weekend. Who knows what colours we’ll pick, what scenes?

Laura will choose. She’ll feel into what is moving her in the moment, and we’ll do that, go there. What of the new will I discover? I wonder.

Tonight I choose. We have a reservation at my favourite restaurant in Ghent – Shazanna. It’s the home of astonishing pasta and no doubt other delights. We’ll smile a lot.

(I love/hate it when WordPress corrects my spelling mistakes. I just typed “smike”. It was changed to “smoke”. We definitely won’t be doing a lot of that.)

I await my friend