At the beginning of August my younger daughter arrived here with her three children. Part of the way through her stay my two eldest grand-children arrived overlapping the arrival of their mother, her partner and their two young children; these last visitors left yesterday morning. Through the course of these past weeks life as I know it, my quiet ‘normal life’, has been ‘on-hold’. Instead of filling my days with reading, writing and generally pottering about, I have been commuting daily to one beach or another, one café or another, one ice-cream parlour or another, one bar or another or one taverna or another. I have been playing the role of a holiday-making grandfather. It is not an easy role for me to play.
At some time towards the end of my holiday-making a peculiar desire came upon me; a desire to get far away from here for a while. I had a disturbing feeling that, if I stayed here for any length of time after my visitors had left I would slip back into the uncreative furrow of lethargy I had been ploughing through the months before they arrived. I resolved to yield to this unsolicited escapist emotion and leave here as soon after my last visitors left as was reasonable. On 25th August I booked myself a one-way ticket for 12th September on a ferry to Italy. I leave here on Monday with a very loose itinerary - I shall be heading towards Ireland to look for what inspired Yeats and, perhaps, to look for something of myself. I have no idea at present about when I shall be ready to return from wherever my journey will end.
Through the past several months this blog has, along with many other of my pursuits, suffered considerable neglect; neglect due to involuntary lassitude and, more recently, to shameless hedonism. Through the weeks ahead I hope that my travels will terminate the lethargic stupor into which I have slipped and invigorate creativity sufficiently for me to resume regular, interesting and thought provoking, blog posts.
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