Must be here somewhere

It's been two and a half weeks since we moved but I still feel more dislocated than relocated. I keep turning the wrong way in the kitchen, opening the wrong drawer in the bathroom and fumbling for light switches which aren't where they used to be. For two weeks I didn't have the internet which meant that I had to do about three hundred administrivial things like paying bills and finding out about bin night by talking to actual people using what my mum calls the steam powered telephone. It felt really odd to ask questions out loud rather than looking for a written answer on a website. And the boxes I've unpacked! Who knew that thousands of books would need scores of boxes to move a mile. And none of them feel like they're in the right places yet.

The fact that the government changed while I was off-line gave me a real sense of precariousness about the state of the world. The telly kept talking about "Prime Minister-elect Rudd" but I didn't really believe it because I couldn't read political bloggers. I kept expecting to wake up one morning and find out the election result was all a house-moving delusion.

This sense of unease and confusion wasn't helped by reading the deeply unsettling A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Benton/. This is about the physicist Shroedinger (of the cat fame) who left Austria for political reasons after Hitler invaded. He sought refuge in Dublin during the Second World War when the infant Irish nation was in a state of tenuous neutrality, being bombed "accidentally" by the Germans and half expecting to be invaded by either side.

Schroedinger didn't really fit in. He lived with his wife, mistress and unacknowledged child in a deeply Catholic society. His home life suffered because of food and heat shortages and because he had a disastrous affair. His work wasn't going well. The weather was foul. He had enemies, both real and imagined, everywhere.

Benton created a great sense of menace and danger throughout this book that kept me perpetually off balance as I waited for some momentous disaster or another. I also felt quite out of my depth during long discussion about Irish poltics and physics. So, not really an easy read for a beach holiday.