Last day of work for 9 days

Friday 26th October

Yes, it’s true.  I am having another week off work.  I really hope my boss is not one of the twenty or so souls who deign to occasionally read this stuff, as this is my fifth week of hols with one more at Christmas to come, when I am only officially allowed four.  Not that it costs him a penny when I go away.  Nobody touches my work, there is no paid temp, no-one even shifted over from other duties.  If I do not do my work, I have to do it.  In any case I have asked him to e-mail me some work ‘in case I get bored’, and to satisfy my own      very slightly guilty conscience.

But as usual a strangely febrile and skittish mood infects me when the finishing line is in sight.  No more plodding round the treadmill, my feet literally skip along the pavement as I knock down the days and the tasks until it is time for me to go.

So, tomorrow (today for you lot) we will set out at seven, sandwiches packed, car full to overflowing, dogs excited – because with all the packing they have known for a week we are going somewhere, and head for Folkestone and the Chunnel, and by just after nine we will emerge into – well knowing the Pas de Calais, probably much the same drizzle and gloom we leave behind us.  But whoopee we will be back in France.  And now of course, with mobile phones and e-mails you are never that far away, the physical presence of that body of water lets you feel you are out of reach for a few days at least.  See you soon.