I forgot the title

I need a break. Right now, my idea of a break is to work on something this coming Bank Holiday Monday, but the difference is that I dropped off the materials on site yesterday and will walk to the job. I have been driving  a 50 mile round trip for weeks, and I don't want to get into the car again until Tuesday. I need a break from the news too, but that is going to be more difficult. I need a break from listening to politicians saying, 'in hindsight'.

I really must try to finish the thing I began writing about 25 years ago, but without some sort of funding I really don't have the time. I believe it is worth carrying on with, and so did a few literary friends and a couple of sympathetic publishers, but it is difficult to pick up the thread when you are preoccupied with simply surviving.

I have a recurring image of all the characters that I cajoled into existence, standing there and staring at me like extras on a film set waiting for further instructions. I made them as real as a disparate group of miss-fits and eccentrics can be, and I owe them a duty of care to resolve the situation I put them in. Nobody else is going to do it.

One year we went to a circular medieval village just south of Carcassonne just because of the restaurant we ate at when attending the wedding of young friends a couple of years before. On that occasion we had lunch, but toward the end of the afternoon they began firing up a massive open griddle with large oak logs so that it would be hot enough to cook dinner on by 7.30. We vowed to return just so that we could eat from that medieval roaster and we followed the trail of sweet-scented woodsmoke two summers later.

It was a chateau set in the middle of the village with one road in and one road out, delineated by the ancient dwellings of former serfs. The owner was a really nasty bastard of the sort that only the French hospitality sector can produce, but luckily he rarely got involved in the day-to-day running of the place, so we could try to forget we were giving him quite a lot of our money to stay there.

The staff were charming, and every evening one of the girls would come out into the yard to feed a stray cat which had come to expect it. One day the girl came to find us in tears and - in bad English - told us that the owner had told her that if she didn't get rid of the cat by the next day, he would kill it himself.

I went to find him and told him that if he so much as touched the cat, I would touch him harder. The cat stayed and the owner became instantly more polite and friendly toward us, but I don't know how he was with the staff.

Anyway, when not taking trips into the Disneyesque centre of Carcassonne, we would lie about in the dappled shade of the chateau grounds, H.I. reading her book and me writing mine.

That's what I think of as an idyllic break.