The brink of a silence.

Ach. Once again, there is so much I would say but cannot. Remember that Oasis song "Wonderwall"? The one with the lines that go "There are many things that I would like to say to you / but I don't know how"? I have always found this song comforting, because at least I'm not the only person to whom this kind of thing happens. Once again, I find myself at an ostensible end, wondering what might have been different had timing been better.

Hem is on the iPod as I pack for more than a week away, a week that will take me to the continent for the first time since my arrival in Cambridge, a week that will see my newest acquaintances' returning to that other home world of mine, a week that will see me return to this country with family and then split from them, to spend days with other loved ones elsewhere. "We'll meet along the way, I know," the band sings. I love that this song from their latest album begins, "Go easy now; go easy now." So much of my world, for the past few years, seems to have centered on exceptional people's passing into my life and then slipping back out of it, always in a way that feels premature. I do my best to be cool about it, but whatever coolness I manage is mostly fakery: what I'm desperate to know, even more than why they keep going, is when the staying one will arrive.

Somehow, when I ordered lunch in Grantchester today, I missed the word "whole" on the menu. Of course, later, I could see it there, in plain type. But all I saw after our walk through village and meadow was "baked trout," and so I ordered it. And there it was, head and all, grinning at me with its fishy teeth.

I am one of a family of photographers. This trout might be the best documented lunch entree ever.