TAKING A BREAK

We have gone. We are not accessible. We are being selfish.

The idea of the “staycation” became briefly fashionable but it wasn’t until we did one we realised how refreshing it could be. Forget “chillaxing” which is what David Cameron did posing with a fat tummy for the paparazzi in Ibiza. Forget walking in wet Wales and coming up with whizzy ideas like calling a General Election - yaki da Theresa.

The idea is simple - you create a programme of things you want to do - a series of restaurants you want to visit - the rest is conversation, looking and listening. Oh and reading, lots of reading. The rules are no work, no e-mail, no news, no phone and absolutely no surreptitious visits to the office.

We shall visit Stockbridge to see friends and then Winchester for evensong - a magically uplifting experience; Rye because it’s so fabulous, quirky and unspoilt ; the bluebells at Arlington; Eastbourne for the nicest seafront in the world; Salisbury for the infinity font, the Cathedral close which is one of the most pleasant places in Britain outside Oxbridge and that spire - the tallest church spire in Britain (no wonder Constable was so smitten by it); we’ll go to Guildford  for lunch with friends taking in the RHS Wisley Garden; to Gun Wharf Key at Portsmouth for some retail therapy; to Parham House, one of the gems in the South East, a superb Elizabethan house reeking of history  (it has a long gallery 160 feet long where the Parham troop of yeomanry were drilled in the late 18th century - when it was raining).

We’ll stroll around the wonderful gardens and finally have a day in Chichester and a wander round the Cathedral and listen to some sublime music.

That’s the idea. A reasonably busy, flaneur sort of week absorbing, going to places we’ve been before but discovering things we’d missed. Reasonably busy but not a route march. We’re happy to go on exciting detours and miss out some of this if we discover something we like. This is meant to be a slow movement week where whatever we see will stew deliciously in our minds (hopefully).

We spend too much of our lives in “transmit” mode - well I do anyway. I get up earlier than my wife so by 7am I may have already read the Times and the key issues on the Today programme ready to loudly present the news together with my commentary on the important issues in what my poor wife, cowering helplessly under the bedclothes, describes as “that hectoring voice of yours - as if you were addressing fifty and not just me”.

We shall see if the “staycation” does the trick, whether we shall both be more affable, receptive and happy people as a result of it. The prospect of escaping the refrain of Conservative candidates saying “strong and stable leadership” and the whole electioneering process will be reward enough for me.