What I did on my holidays

O, dear me. Is it August already and the internet's audience figures are dipping because some of my readers think I've gone missing. Well, I'm sorry but a rest is as good as a change, as nobody ever said.
Just imagine if ITV1 didn't broadcast for a week and a half. Wouldn't that be awful.
But, like any jobbing columnist, I can attempt to dress up sundry items from my little life to pass off as entertainment. It is only a crying shame that I'm not Giles Coren or his sister or Robert Crampton and receive five figure amounts into my bank account for such lazy jottings-down.
I've been on my holidays, you see. Not the sort of holiday that my nephew, Chris, is on, who is just about to arrive in Mongolia having driven there in a tiny motor car through places like Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and, perhaps most dangerously, England.
http://www.thewongwayround.co.uk/
With all fingers and toes crossed, it is starting to look as if they might make it but we don't count chickens here. But best of luck to the intrepidness of their adventure. I've been pick-pocketed in Prague and Budapest and then sort of lost the will for such wild exploration but I hope they are finding that lots of different sorts of foreigners can be really nice to you.
My spirit of going into the unknown is tested when I begin to worry about having my ticket checked on the train from Bath to Swindon if the connection from Portsmouth has been late and put me on a later train than my ticket explicitly stipulates. This is nerve-end stuff as I have no idea what I'd do if I was thrown off at Chippenham.
But once I've arrived, I can relax a little bit. Not being at work for a week is an amazing elixir of freedom and laxity but I can't explain why because any word here about the way my office is run might end in unspeakable investigations although one can take some meagre comfort in the fact that Stalin didn't die in vain.
As well as blessing various relations with my presence, I saw some of the most minor tourist attractions in the area on a couple of nice, gentle walks, like Faringdon Folly and Cirencester Amphitheatre.
I had in mind a couple of titles from my father's bookshelves that I might read, including a tribute to Stan Barstow in a look at A Kind of Loving but I settled on Stanley Middleton's early novel, Harris's Requiem, which, being from 1960, was somewhat more pointed and less genteel than his later books and it did prove most diverting.
The usual and expected controversies over the rules of Scrabble were encountered in both Fairford and Swindon, which is strange when one reflects that the rules are quite clear for everyone to read and understand. But having come from behind and nicked the result off my dad with JEERINGLY in Fairford, I did an exhibition round against my very sporting and kindly sister in Swindon last night, beginning with FAINTLY and, 84-0 up after one play then put in a personal best of 449. She said she thought I'd come home and put something about that on my website. I said I didn't think I would.
And, also, well played to those players of Rummikub who did well at that.

The full programme for the Cheltenham Literature Festival was published this week. I hope I'm not forcing myself on my family more often than they would like but I can't help but think that I really ought to be there for this, http://www.cheltenhamfestivals.com/find-events/literature/l305-david-harsent-sean-obrien-paul-muldoon and so I'll try to be.
David Harsent has come from a dark horse position to strong favourite to lift this website's award for best poetry collection of 2011; Muldoon, amongst many other glories attached to his name, was best poem according to me last year, and O'Brien is so habitually listed on every prize list that I'm thinking I'll have to leave him off one of mine this year. But Cheltenham is so lovely, I can hardly bear not to go and see such a dream line-up of clever, smartarse, curmudgeonly, middle-aged talent. They are everything I ever wanted to be. And I haven't come this far to give up now.