We're all going on a .......

Actually we have just come back from our summer holiday. Two whole weeks of gorgeous sunshine, delicious food, and the fabulous hospitality that is Turkey. Of course today I am paying for it all with a desk full of emails, invoices, post, and a week ahead of meetings etc that require preparation. That, and a guest appearance in the Sydenham community play next Sunday afternoon, should mean that the holiday will soon become a distant memory.

Yet it is incredibly important. It’s two whole weeks that I get to spend exclusively with my partner. It’s all about me and him, and allows us to renew our batteries, and the joy we have in spending time with each other. It also allows me to step away from my work, and see things in perspective. It’s very easy for actors, desperate for work, and constantly having to chase every opportunity that comes up, not to allow any time for themselves. Between leaving drama school in 1978, and meeting my partner in 1996, I took one holiday. Sometime in 1994, having opened a production at Nottingham Playhouse, I took the leap and booked a package holiday to the Canary Islands for myself for one week. Before that, I had always worried that the week I would go away would be the week that the job came up. The job that I’d always waited for. The job that would change my life. Of course it never did, and meeting my partner, and having something in my life more important than my career, suddenly meant that holidays took on a new significance.

Over the last five years or so, I have been in the position of turning down a job before most of our holidays. Were it not for holidays I would have been in “ The Damned United”  the new BBC adaptation of "Jonathan Strange and Mr Norell”  and a rather dubious action adventure set in India with Ben Affleck. All of those have been turned down because we had a holiday already booked.

Yes I am allowed to check my email while on holiday. I leave it as much as possible until the late afternoon and try and limit it to one hour a day, but as a self-employed freelancer it would be foolish to turn off entirely for 14 days and not respond to any enquiries. But the ruling in our house is once the holiday is booked, the holiday is taken, and it's a rule I’m happy to abide by.

 My career is very important to me, but so is my life and that’s what a holiday is part of.  A chance to rejuvenate, a chance to relax, a chance to overeat, and a chance to explore.

 And actually, this year I managed to make my holiday inspire a little bit of my work. I wrote my latest column for The Stage just before I went.  Without a holiday, I wouldn’t have been able to write it.

So signing off now while I scour the internet for bargains for the autumn. Once a holiday is over, another needs putting in the diary.



Anyone been to Oman?




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