travelling writer

We are hanging out at the Children’s Hospice this week. As you do. We are able to come every ten-ish weeks, usually for three or four nights at a time. We have been looking forward to this week, because we’re both shattered.

I was hoping to capture a lot of words whilst we were here, but so far I have only got about two thousand down on paper. I am within about ten thousand of finishing the first draft of the sequel to Lost In Time and I am desperate to get it done with. I know exactly what is going to happen, but finding the time to get that down on paper seems to be almost impossible at the moment.

In the meantime, Mr AL and I have made a commitment to be less hard on ourselves and try to spend a bit more time together. With that in mind, we have accepted an offer from the hospice to have our younger child for nearly a week in mid-July and we are looking to book a trip somewhere with our older child, just the three of us, with no wheelchair ramps necessary.

You have no idea how peculiar this makes me feel. On the one hand I am incredibly excited to be going away for a few nights. To Paris. PARIS! On the other hand I am wracked with guilt about leaving Child Two at the hospice.

She loves it here. There is the jacuzzi, messy play, the Narnia garden, the music room, lots of television and iPad opportunities, soft play and all the lovely people to talk to and play with. But leaving her still makes me feel like hell.

There have been two other families here this week with us and we have been chatting. I don’t think this is an unusual thing for ‘families like ours’ to feel. I put that in quotes because that is how a lot of the professionals who surround us describe us. Not here at the hospice, though; here, we are talked of as ‘our families’, which is lovely.

Anyway. The top and the bottom of it is that instead of writing this afternoon, I have been on the phone to Railbookers and I have a quote. And Mr AL is currently organising an appointment with the passport office; everyone else’s has run out and mine makes me look like Myra Hindley.

It’s very easy to bang out four hundred words of rambling like this. But poor Alec and Lew are stuck in Max’s office having an emotional altercation and I’m probably not going to be able to get them out of there before the dinner bell goes.

For today, that is all.