Saturday 14th April

We have been driving back all day yesterday and again today.  I quite like travelling and looking over the fields as we speed past, but France is such a vast country that even when one has been travelling at 85 miles per hour for a couple of hours and it is only a few inches on the map.

When one is travelling towards a destination, especially a new one, one is full of hope and ideas and above all else a pervading sense of excitement which naturally rises as one approaches closer.  The return journey, while still a part of the holiday, brings on strange feelings almost of regret at not achieving quite that which one set out to accomplish, mixed with emotions of parting, especially if one had a good time, and slight feelings of sadness at returning to one’s normal life again, with the daily grind, the pile of washing and the even more tiresome pile of letters to address.

Sometimes when one considers it in the cold light of day, a holiday is an enormous waste of time, but the opposite, having no holidays, leaves one feeling denied and almost a second-class citizen.  In any case I have had a good time.  I always feel comfortable in France, like a warm jumper one slips into every now and then, it may be a bit old and frumpy but it is so warm and cosy that one wonders why on earth one doesn’t wear it more often.