Or nine days, as I like to think of it, because if I was away somewhere, the weekends would be part of the holiday. But mine is a genuine staycation, in my little house, with my kittens. I am spoilt. I will be going away overnight mid-week, gasp, but kipping on my sister’s sofa so I can go to Blackwell’s doesn’t really count.
I haven’t had real time off since March, and then I spent the week watching all the Marvel movies in chronological order. Time well spent indeed, but I do not have an equivalent goal for this week. It’s not that suddenly I became all achievey, but I’m not good with unstructured time. I need balance.
I’m thinking that a target of translating 150 lines of Medea would be good. That doesn’t sound a lot, but that’s about 8 hours at my painfully slow rate, plus goal of at least dimly understanding not only what the translation is but why it’s that. There is only so much time I can focus on Greek before it dissolves into squiggles on a page. I’ve put all my work kit in the loft and my Greek books are on my desk, so every time I walk past I think ‘That play won’t translate itself.’
But today, it turned out that I had to sit on the sofa for most of the day and read a Jack Reacher. This is because just as I was thinking I might move, Belle sat on me. And there she stayed, for hours. And hours. Fortunately the sofa is near the Reacher and O’Brian shelves. At intervals, we’d both move, and then we’d re-settle. Who am I to argue with a cat? I know my place.
