Hooray, Hooray for the Holidays!

Well, that's it - I finally finished with work for the rest of Summer. The next few weeks are entirely mine.  Now, I could go off onto another of my diatribes about the awfulness of my job, but I'm just too tired.  Both literally and figuratively.  I haven't been sleeping well this week, which has left me feeling exhausted and falling asleep on the sofa in the evenings.  I'm also tired of the constant fight that work has become.  Plus, it has been a particularly horrendous working week.  But hey, all that is behind me, for the time being at last, and I'm now looking forward to my time off.  Of course, in the past I always used to tell people that I was going to spend my late Summer break performing at the Edinburgh Fringe.  Every year I'd come up with some fake title for my mythical one man show and an equally fake venue.  The deception became quite elaborate, but eventually the fun went out of it and now, well, I just don't tell anybody at work where I'm going or what I'm doing.  Not because I'm being secretive, but because this is my time, exclusively for me.  Just minimising human contacts for a few weeks is a relief, I can tell you.

Which is a very good reason why I don't actually go to the Edinburgh Festival for real - far too many people.   With a fair proportion of them probably bring knob ends.  It's the sort of event which inevitably attracts a certain proportion of those utterly pretentious pseudo-intellectual types.  Both as acts and in the audience.  Don't get me wrong - I'm not knocking the Festival or the Fringe, they are undoubtedly a lot of fun, but it also all looks potentially wearying if you are there for the long haul.  Just too much to try and take in.  Like I said, I'm looking to spend my time off more quietly.  I just want a few weeks of tranquility in my life.  Which means lots of country walks and sitting on beaches watching the ships go by.  That never fails to relax me.  Above all, I really must sort out my sleep patterns which, for the past few months, have been variously disrupted by the hot weather, medication related stomach upsets and a recurrence of tinnitus in my left ear, (this, thankfully, has now faded away again, as it always does).  Once I'm sleeping properly again, I'll be able to think clearly again and, hopefully, stat moving forwards again.