For me, it’s very difficult to return from a two week holiday and not feel like Sam saying “Well, I’m back” at the end of Lord of the Rings. Fourteen days always ends up feeling like a long time – but I think this break has been good for me. Two weeks in southern Spain, staying with my in-laws in a rather lovely and roomy house that’s about an hour from Alicante, and gave us all plenty of opportunities to not do very much and sit by the pool. There was some exploring, a few trips, and an expedition to the beach (which was the most touristy beach I’ve ever been on – and actually gave me some major Jaws flashbacks, mainly because I’ve never actually swum at a big, wide, American-style touristy beach when it’s sunny – blame my Cornish upbringing…), but most of this time was spent being inactive and recharging my batteries. This isn’t something I’m always good at – my brain is very adept at tying itself in knots and creating things for me to get worked up about – but overall, it’s been a very good holiday for me, one that gave me the chance to see plenty of Spaghetti Western-style scenery and have lots of fun. The journey back was relatively smooth (although extremely hard work), and today is going to be mostly set aside for recovery and general lying around going “uhhhhhh”…

It certainly helped that the run-up to the holiday was one of my most insanely busy work periods ever. Cramming proofreading, reviews and interviews into less than a week was certainly an education- from the beginning of the Edinburgh Festival through to the departure for the holiday, almost every single hour of my life was accounted for. I’ve now got a slightly quieter time, so hopefully I’ll be able to do some sorting out and re-orient myself. There are things I need to do to get myself back on track, and lots of them revolve around me doing lots and lots of writing.

Plenty to do. Not enough time to do it.

And- in case you were wondering – there’s still no news about the novel…