Not so much as a shopping list

Writing that is. I haven't written so much as a shopping list since I last signed in.

Creative hiatus, I call it. Don't even pretend to do anything remotely artistic and suddenly the muse will come. That's the theory, anyway.

So I took myself and the children off with my friend and her children to their house in the Charente region of France. It's like stepping back in time to a rural 50s countryside where children can roam free on their bikes and visit friends or play endless make-believe games in the large, rambling back garden, utterly free of adult interference. The only time they were summoned back was when the neighbouring farmer warned us that there were hunters out in the fields. The hunters target small birds, but are renowned, due to the amount of the local liquor they imbibe from about seven in the morning, for hitting larger, more domestic prey such as cows, or small children. The kids put on a circus in the barn. The two eight year-old boys performed with their flower sticks and diablos, the two ten year-old girls showed of their trampolining and trapeze skills and the three year old performed some magnetic magic. The audience of two mums was suitably impressed. During the day we pootled around doing not much at all except making sure that food was on the table at the appropriate times and chatting over lots of tea and coffee. In the evenings, trying not to indulge in nicotine, we did Very Difficult Jigsaws, mainly composed of blocks of one colour, read, talked, and drank loads, so much that my liver hurt by the end of the holidays. We also, for some reason, found it incredibly difficult to go to bed, and were still up at one am, even when we'd decided to get an early night. As we were up with children at seven, I came back from the holidays knackered.

I know that when we came back from Wales I said that I really wanted a holiday home in Wales. Well, now I really want a holiday home in France. Either way I'll have to set about earning it. That, if nothing else, is a good spur to my creative endeavour.

It was also quite nice to miss my husband. We get so used to the daily grind of domestic life that we never really have time to think about each other. We've made that classic error of ignoring our own relationship in favour of our roles as parents and family.