Holidays

Why is it that the week before a holiday, time seems to crawl. Literally, I swear time starts going backwards. It’s like you can see it and you can almost grab a hold of it and yet … somehow, it still feels like it’s a million light years away – and you don’t have the help of the Enterprise. Sometimes, it feels like life really does give you lemons. 
But, for the first time in far too long I have a holiday booked – and more miraculously than that Charlotte is also off on holiday (that’s not the miraculous part) for almost the same period of time. For me, it’s been four years give or take now since I last went away. When I’d taken holiday before – because I had a job that meant I worked anti-social hours – the holiday that I would take I would use for our writing. Mainly, because if I took the holiday and went away with it … I’d feel guilty knowing that we could do something good with it. I mean, bad enough that I worked awkward hours without throwing a holiday into the mix.

Dedication, stupidity call it what you will, but this year I’m making sure that I go. That doesn’t mean that the writing’s going to come to a halt because I fully intend to make use of the time and the scenery that I’ll have to hand! Whilst Charlotte is off to one of Spain’s sunny Islands, I’m off to the Lake District and Scotland. Places that, for me, hold far more magic than any other place has.

Growing up partly in Scotland, you get used to a lot of the folklore and the superstitions, and the castles and the buildings and the landscaping. The misty rolling hills and the crystal clear loch’s that are around the place. For me, it’s the perfect place to go and write because it speaks to my heart, and you can well imagine what it must have been like in times gone by, in one of the croft’s and how things would have been explained away with kelpie’s, some other mischievous or malevolent creature, ghosts, ghouls and so on.

I’m already fantasising about it, and I have to get through the next 6 days before I’m off … and I’m watching the time tick slowly by as I wait to grab my holiday with both hands!

~ Clara