World Clocks at Parque de Pasatempo, Galicia, Spain (Photo By Óscar (xindilo/fotosderianxo) – This file was derived from: Reloxos no Parque do Pasatempo, Betanzos.jpg, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42176234)

Dear Readers, jet lag is a truly miserable phenomenon, as I am finding to my cost this week. On my way to Canada I adjusted within 24 hours – we travelled out early, dragged ourselves through the whole day and were so exhausted by the time we got to bed that we slept right through. On the way east, though, it’s a different story – again we dragged ourselves through the day following an overnight flight, but when I got to bed I was instantly awake, and stayed that way until about 4 a.m. At 4.30 a.m. the cat started to sing the song of her people, and so that was that.

That  was on Sunday. Every morning I’ve made sure to get up early and mingle with people (the light and being around other folk is supposed to reset your body clock), and on Wednesday I coupled that with falling flat on my face, having tripped over a speck of dust/molecule/something invisible. You might remember that I have a habit of doing this but I’m pretty sure that jet lag was implicated in the stumble. No harm done! And my trusty twenty year-old Canon Powershot survived the fall, which was something of a miracle.

The friend that I was with is a first-aider at her workplace, and as I staggered into the café she asked if the staff would break out their first aid box. Antiseptic wipes, plasters and antiseptic cream were soon applied (thank you Coal House Café) and I can recommend the coffee and the chocolate and mandarin gluten-free cake, just what you need to get over a shock. Plus, having watched every season of Masterchef the Professionals it was a delight to have a knee covered in bright blue catering sticking plasters.

So, what the hell is jet lag? At root, it’s chronobiological (and what a great word that is)  – we have a body clock in our brain, called the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), which is closely linked to light reception, and little ‘clocks’ in our cells, which record the amount  of time since we last slept. Unfortunately, these two systems don’t always work at the same rate – we can use light to reset our SCN (and indeed elite athletes often use light therapy to help them reset their body clocks), but the receptors in other parts of our body take different rates to catch up.

People swear by melatonin (not available for use in the UK), the aforementioned light therapy, keeping to the sleep-wake schedule of the country that you came from (not practical in most cases), and various drugs, some of them illegal. This may cure the jet lag, but I wonder if any of you also have a strange sense of dissociation, when you arrive home after a trip, a feeling that ‘home’ is not quite the same as it was? I nearly always have this, and it takes a few days for things to feel ‘right’ again. I wonder if humans were meant to travel as far and as fast as we do these days – after all, jet lag is a modern phenomenon. Time was it would have taken weeks on a ship and then overland to travel from London to Toronto, and now we can do it, door to door, in about twelve hours. No wonder our poor minds and bodies are confused! Some cultures have a sense that the body travels so fast that it takes the soul a while to catch up.

There’s an interesting article about just this phenomenon by one of my favourite travel writers, Nick Hunt. He describes walking to Istanbul from London back in 2011, and then returning by plane, and how disorientated it made him feel. Here’s his description of what jet lag really is:

‘At three miles an hour, the world is a continuum. One thing merges into the next: hills into mountains, rivers into valleys, suburbs into city centers; cultures are not separate things but points along a spectrum. Traits and languages evolve, shading into one another and metamorphosing with every mile. Even borders are seldom borders, least of all ecologically. There are no beginnings or endings, only continuity.

If driving breaks that continuity, flying explodes it. It shatters reality into bits that have to be pieced back together. We label this “jet lag” — a disruption of the circadian rhythm caused by different time zones — but what really lags behind is much more fundamental.'(Nick Hunt, ‘Travelling at the Speed of the Soul’)

I think there is also something about integrating and processing what has happened while you’ve been away. For me, this journey was both a delightful experience (The eclipse! Renewing friendships! Seeing beavers!) and a melancholy time, a reacquaintance with the demon of dementia and the heaviness and sadness that it brings. So I came home carrying a lot, good and bad, and maybe it’s no surprise that I fell. But today things seem to be settling a little more, and home feels more like home, and the cat only sings from about 6 a.m. as opposed to every hour, on the hour. And so, things are inching back to normal.

But not for long, because soon I’ll be off again. More on that soon!