Today we arrived back home after what feels like months away, but which was really only 15 days. We spent six days in Mallorca, where my lovely inlaws looked after the children, I found myself busily editing my next book whenever trips to places with names like ‘Aqualand’ came up, and the sun shone without stopping.
After that we went to London and stayed for a few nights in a house belonging to friends who were on holiday, which meant we were able to pretend to be the sort of people who live in a beautiful house in West London; it also meant the children got to learn how to cross roads and use the Tube. They were soon frowning at people who put their feet on the seats and racing for the empty space at the end of the carriage.
The five of us dashed around, and visited museums, galleries, the maze in Trafalgar Square. We walked up the Monument and went to Toy Story 3 in the Trocadero. We were proper tourists and it was wonderful. The Polka Theatre in Wimbledon, a children’s theatre, was a great discovery, though by then I would have been grateful for any form of entertainment that involved sitting down in a darkened room.
We are now back in Cornwall and although it’s raining, it’s good to be home after our blast of city life. London was wildly exciting for a few days, but it’s good to be back. Now I have a book to finish, The Perfect Lie out in paperback next week, and I’m going to be talking at the Penzance Literary Festival a few days after that. James and the children are off school for another three weeks, but I am very much back at work.
There is something magical about getting up stupidly early in the morning to get on with writing a book that would otherwise still be half-finished in a couple of weeks, at deadline time. The world is still, everyone else is asleep, but, outside, it still looks like daytime. Lately, sunlight has been pouring in, as I sit at the kitchen table with my coffee close to hand and apply myself to the task of getting the hell on with it.
It is much easier to concentrate at that time, because there is no point whatsoever in getting up before 5 only to be distracted by things on the internet, or by idly wondering what’s for breakfast. I know that time is short, that my children will be bumbling sleepily down the stairs in a couple of hours. It is my favourite time of the day, by far, for writing. Anything seems possible.
The downside, of course, is that I feel it’s bedtime by about 3 o’clock, and I am good for nothing at all in the evening. Occasionally when I’m out and about, I catch a glimpse of some poor woman with jowly eyes and bizarre blotchy skin, before realising that it’s a shop window or a mirror. And, to top it all off, I am the proud owner of a caffeine twitch which (unless everyone is kindly lying to me) is invisible to the outside world.
All the same, for the next few weeks, this is my life and I am strangely enjoying it, but only because it’s adrenaline-charged by pure panic. When it’s finished I will be back to 7 o’clock starts, which will be a luxury. I wish I could send a postcard back through time to my decade-ago self announcing that there would come a time when 7am would be classified as a lie-in. On balance, though, it’s probably best that I can’t.
Aug 10, 2010 
