Break

The last few weeks have been endured rather than experienced, with every single strand of my life pulling at me in one way or another. Some of it has been wonderful (my daughter turned seven yesterday, so there’s been lots of fun stuff in there, and I got to see one of my all-time favourite bands play for two hours in a tiny venue from the barrier) and some of it has been not so wonderful (work is pretty stressful and seems to involve me not being able to spend long enough at my desk to actually do my job) but all of it has collectively been exhausting. What I need is a weekend of relaxation and low brain use, followed by a week of actually getting caught up at work.
In order to recharge my batteries I’ve decided to take a two week sabbatical from my self-imposed writing target of three sessions a week. If I feel like writing this weekend, or next week while Ellen is at work, then great. If not, I’m not going to beat myself up about it. Work on the second draft has been going really well recently, so I think there’s no harm in allowing myself to take a break, because quite frankly my brain feels on the cusp of some kind of reactive shutdown. I’m going to watch Sopranos, biffle about with Spotify playlists and generally chill out.

One of the things that hasn’t helped is my tendency after a particularly hard fought day to reach straight for a wine bottle to help me unwind (not to say I’ve got a problem or anything, we’re talking a couple of nights a week here). A good bottle of wine with the lovely E and the contents of my TiVo box is just about my favourite de-stress method. However, it completely invalidates itself the next day when you end up feeling sluggish of mind for the entire day, making you fight twice as hard to get to home time, and meaning you fancy another bottle even more. Maybe I should consider no more vino on school nights. That seems likely, tight?

I did almost suggest to E that we have a dry weekend this weekend, but then I remembered that it’s Eurovision on Saturday night. Now I love me some Eurovision; the dreadful music, the dreadful everything else, the pseudo Machiavellian political backstabbing of the voting. Highly entertaining, even since Wogan stopped presenting it through a Baileys haze. But the prospect of watching it without suitable lubrication is quite terrifying. So maybe not.