Holiday! Celebrate!

My wife I took my first break away from home in two years last week. This was for two days at the seaside, and in order to do it I defaulted on this month's mortgage payment. But my God we needed the break. Right this moment, even though I'm going back to work, I feel on top of the world.
We got as much sleep as possible. My sleeping is disturbed during the night. I have to keep getting up to pee. I'm worried that I might be diabetic, I'm too frightened to ask the doctor. I know I need to exercise more. Anyway, I got to nap in the afternoons.
I didn't read as much as I wanted. Not until the coach journey home, which got gridlocked on the motorway. Some silly sod moaned that he'd sue National Express for compensation. During that time, I re-read M.R. James's Number 13 and Count Magnus for the umpteenth times, and was swept away by his sheer storytelling prowess.
I hardly wrote anything, either, except oddly enough (because I tend not to write when my wife is in the room) in our hotel suite, while my wife was getting washed or dressed. I had a few idle moments each morning before we went down to breakfast, so I got out my notepad and began Writing Practice again, as advocated by Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down The Bones. I was reluctant to start, but once I did, the words poured out of me. My Creative Writing tutor had given me the class the topic of Barbers, so I wrote down, frenziedly, some memories of getting my hair cut. None of it particularly good in itself, but it loosened me up mentally, and it also readjusted me to writing something other than horror stories.
I've been thinking on and off about writing something other than horror fiction for a while now. It's always been something I felt I ought to do, but now I began thinking this might be something I might enjoy. Another thing I did on this break was to buy the Daily Mirror and read it carefully, as much as I could bear. Normally, I avoid the new because it depresses me, but now, because I wasn't going to work, I felt I had reserves of optimism enought to read it. I used to do this all the time when I wrote mainstream contemporary stories and plays. The Daily Mirror is a great source of one-paragraph human stories you tend not to get in broadsheets. You know the sort of thing: the man who organized his own wedding before he even had a girlfriend, the getaway driver who hid himself in the boot of his getaway car and got locked in. There's plenty of grim stuff, too, and you can't avoid that if you want to write fiction. At some point, even the Mills and Boon writer (or the horror fiction writer) has to confront pain.
It feels at this moment like a sort of New Year's Day. I've been making resolutions, promising myself that I will participate more in the world. Two days on the English coast, a few strolls along the beach and a few cream teas, and I feel as good as new.
I saw Britain at its best and worst. There's something about journeys, at least when there's something to see outside the window, which brings a country into focus. The allotments, the views into other people's windows, the views of high streets, takeaway shops, the dead foxes on the roads, the pylons, hedgerows, thatched cottages. The pounding basslines from open car windows. The car horns. The millions of indicators in the fading light, like glowing embers on a coal fire. The sidings.
Bus and train stations are the worst. The lost souls, screaming and shouting. The coffee bars with just one Mars Bar on the shelf.
And even in holiday resorts, you're never far from the homeless. Wandering around dazed and alienated, with their hoods up in all weathers. Speech slurred by drink. Looking, hoping for some little kindness.