I was 21 years when I wrote heard this song

For some reason this makes me sad, as It's Wrong to Wish on Space Hardware was one of the blogs that inspired me to start my own, and the tagline at the end of each post of mine was a direct tribute. James will tell you where my tagline's from if you can't place it. It didn't harm that the Space Hardware tagline comes from a song I associate with an engaging few months I spent in St. Petersburg when I was, well, you guess how old... As I started, IWTWOSH stopped, and our man went off to Hanoi. I never really kept up with his adventures, but he was nonetheless a blogging fixture. It looks as though his sojourn there went really well for all concerned, which gladdens the heart.

I'm sadder, though, due to the mix of sweet and bittersweet reasons we have for going to Hanoi ourselves on Saturday. It was to have been Ms Dynamite-E-e's first chance to see her other great-grandmother, whose illness meant that there was a race on to get there, but on Tuesday we learnt that all our haste had been in vain. It will also be my first visit, and the Imaginary Friend's first since we were married; we planned to go in 2004, but then discovered that arrivals were suddenly much higher up the agenda than departures... So I will be fulfilling a long-held ambition, but, to put it mildly, not in the circumstances that I would have liked.

T'internets have, of course, reached Vietnam, so I may post the odd thing now and then. I hope you'll forgive me, though, if I try and experience the place first-hand rather than rushing to recount it all via the medium of interpretive dance Blogger. Back in two or three weeks. Probably. I may even have broadband again by then... I'm delighted to say, though, that in the meantime Gracchi has very kindly agreed to grace these pages every once in a while, so you'll be in very much more capable hands than you've been used to.