To be honest with you, I feel extremely disinclined to provide an update on my holiday, but a vague deal with readers is still (vaguely) a deal. To recap: several weeks ago, which might as well be several years ago, that’s how detached and switched off from everything I feel up here on my post-holiday cloud, I laid out on this page a plan of self-care for my family sojourn in France.
The plan ran over several headings that included “Bread” and “Swimming” and “Exercise”. It all seemed very feasible to me at the time, but as more than one of my so-called friends pointed out, the possibility of me keeping to The Plan was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. “Face it, Ro, It’s never going to happen,” they said, laughing and falling about the place in the supportive manner found only in the truest of friends.
When I wrote The Plan, you should know – as though it wasn’t crystal clear from that slightly addled column – I wasn’t of the soundest mind or body, due to a kind of work-related spiral. That’s my pre-emptive defence.
Weeks later, my mind hasn’t changed much and my body is pretty much as it was, with perhaps a slightly higher Brie content, but I do feel a lot sounder in both of them. There is a calmness and clarity that comes from deleting the Twitter app and your work email from your phone. There is blessed relief in knowing that for days on end ,your most important decision will be whether you have a plain croissant or a pain au chocolat. There is therapeutic merit in just sitting in a chair with your feet up, reading books and occasionally moving a few feet to do a tiny bit of parenting before sitting back down again and taking up where you left off.
What happened on the holiday was unexpected: I read books the way I used to read books. That is, I ate them. “I’ve finished,” I would announce to a disinterested audience every couple of days. “That’s my fourth one. My fourth!” I’d proclaim excitedly. By the time I closed the final page of my sixth, I felt almost back to my old self. On a good day. Back to My Good Self, you might say.
But, le sigh, I suppose I better get on with it. A vague deal is a deal. Bread: Back when I was work-addled, it seemed feasible that I could on a holiday to France, the bread capital of the world, eschew "bread-type foodstuffs, croissants and their equivalents, including baguettes". Obviously I had a bit of baguette every day. But I did have less baguette than everyone else. In conclusion: I did not say "non to pain". But I did say "non to seconds". Wine: My friend who was heading back from France just as we were heading off told me she had 90 bottles of wine in her boot on return, which was like a dare. I know I said I was going to "dramatically reduce my wine consumption" but I will point you to the fact that I was in the wine capital of the world and there's lovely stuff for €3 in the HyperMarché and I am only human. But there were some nights (three?) when I had that fabled "one glass of wine with dinner". And we only had 11 bottles in the boot heading home. So, you know, progress. Swimming: As I suspected, you can't go on holiday to Brittany with two small children and avoid getting wet. In The Plan I said I would "embrace the water instead of feeling resentful of all the swimming-tog related activities". Success: scary water slides, the freezing sea, outdoor swimming pools with a wave machine, indoor pools with rolling rapids. I did the lot. Failure: I felt resentful 70 per cent of the time, and for pretty much every second spent in the changing rooms of doom. Phone: I did it all. I switched it to airplane mode except when in a wifi zone and watching The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Netflix. I stayed off Twitter and Facebook for two whole weeks. (Ok, so I'm not on Facebook, but still.) I did have some work issues to deal with, but when they were dealt with I went back to pretending I didn't have a job. Fitness: I planned to go on a long walk or run every day. I did not. I lay down a lot. I sat down a lot. I slept a lot. The longest walk I did was the five minute daily stroll for croissants.
When you consider this update of The Plan please bear in mind that I have no regrets whatsoever about failing on almost every count. If this is what “failure” feels like – rested, calm, unburdened, lighter of soul – then I think I prefer it to “success”. roisin@irishtimes.com