Rules

I’m on holiday.

I told someone in the shop I was just about to go on holiday the other day and they gave me a look, as if the idea that I had the sort of job one needed to, or even could, take a holiday from was utterly ridiculous. And I know what she meant in a way – after all, I’m definitely not in the bookshop, but have I taken a holiday from being a writer?

Before we set off I had a number of rules I was pretty certain I was going to stick to.

Firstly, I was going to rise before the sun was fully up, and I was going to walk up to the monastery on the mountain near the villa we’re staying at, around a 2-hour walk, and I was going to have breakfast there. Breakfast would be goats’ curd and honey and figs.

On my return I’d swim and then I’d do maybe a couple of hours work on my book, getting back into it gently before the real energy of working on it when I get home.

Other than that I would read, and in the evenings I would do light yoga.

There would be no writing apart from the work I did on my book.

There was to be no beer drunk on this holiday. The drink would be white wine and it would be at 6 o’clock, with perhaps a single gin and tonic before hand.

No internet or mobile phone for two weeks.

I would return home amazing.

So far, 6 days in to our holiday it’s gone like this:

I have not woken up once before 9 o’clock. Me and my boyfriend drag ourselves out of bed and we do a salute to the sun and then he tries to do some push ups while I look on feeling sick from the heat. He has developed a rash from the sun. I have over-cooked the skin on the top of my chest.

Toast for breakfast and coffee. There is some chocolate chip cereal left here from the last people to use the villa. I have eaten some of this.

After this I plop into the pool wearing a t-shirt because the sun is too hot, then drip about looking for my sunglasses until lunchtime.

Just before lunch I check my emails, reply and say yes to completing a couple of articles and interviews to be completed before the end of the week, and then I worry that I haven’t yet written this blog.

Lunch – this is nice, and I have it with beer.

After lunch it is too hot to do anything but read a book by the pool with a beer. And eat crisps, I can just about do that too.

Probably, I will check my emails three or four times, probably I will look at my friends’ holiday photographs on Facebook.

I might have a sleep.

(I’ve idly eaten close to a whole watermelon and finished a litre of gin.)

I’ve read the whole of a really good book – this is by the sixth day of my holiday, my only achievement.

Richard Ford has written in an essay on how important it is for a writer to recharge their brain by taking time to do nothing after writing a novel.

I think he’s right.