I don't know if you've noticed but I'm on holiday this week. I don't normally go away on holiday so you might have got used to me always being around. But I'm not around at the moment, I am very much away from home, so what you've been reading recently are a number of posts I wrote before I left. As you can see from today's selection, they are now getting a bit brief.
I do go away regularly but mainly to Norfolk to stay with my family and that doesn't really count as a holiday. My last proper holiday was a trip to Copenhagen in 2019, and before that Cornwall in 2018. That is a long time not to have stayed away overnight. These days I am much more a fan of the extreme day trip where I head somewhere like Sunderland, Plymouth or Paris early in the morning, see everything I possibly can and am back in my own bed by nightfall. Why revel in buying a £20 train ticket if you then have shell out for a hotel room, dinner and breakfast?
I haven't travelled quite that far this time but I am over 100 miles from home in a part of the UK I've only visited once before, and let's just say in mixed company. I've been looking forward to seeing the best places again and several others for the first time. Also someone else here has a car, and although I should feel a tad guilty at my back seat passivity it does make visiting off-piste places much easier. The nearest station is over 10 miles away so exploring by train is not an option.
What's particularly unusual about this trip is that I'm away from home for a full week and I haven't done that for ages. A week is very much a normal period for many holidays but most of my recent jaunts have been long weekends, i.e. three- or maybe four-nighters. This is generally survivable blogwise, I only have to have two or three posts up my sleeve in advance and hopefully you never notice, as when I slipped away to Tyneside in 2017 or Berlin in 2015. A full week is however much more of a challenge, especially given I don't normally have a back-up stash of blogposts waiting in the wings.
The last time I went away for a full week, according to my records, was for a family trip to Northumberland in 2007. We travelled all over and ate out of an evening and I was essentially off-grid for seven days, text messages excepted. From a reader's point of view it meant the blog went quiet for a week, ditto total radio silence when I went to the Outer Hebrides in 2006, If you're the kind of reader who worries if my morning post is even an hour late you'd have hated that, maybe even lost the habit of checking in, it being ever so easy to lose a regular audience by failing to turn up.
I've brought my laptop with me on the trip, it's not like 2004 when a holiday meant waving goodbye to your computer and maybe checking into an internet cafe once or twice. But I'm not intending to sit down and knock up 1000 words of illustrated reportage about where I've just been because that's not the most sociable thing to do of an evening, plus hopefully we'll be out and about a lot more than sitting on the sofa.
Which means that when this hiatus is finally over you can expect a slew of posts about my travels, maybe several days worth, just as I subjected you to lengthy travelogues in the aftermath of Copenhagen, Cornwall, Rome, Berlin etc. This merely extends the abnormal period to a week and a bit - a lot of nothing followed by a lot of sightseeing chat - but hey, you'll cope. Consider this a timely reminder that I'm not contracted to provide you with a lengthy post to read every morning, sometimes I go out instead and just occasionally I go away.
