Absolute Holidaying

I decided to take an absolutist approach to holidaying in the Black Forest this year, ie. no writing whatsoever beyond a minimal number of postcards and a quick jotting should any creative thoughts occur*. Usually I feel duty-bound to do a diary, or tinker with a piece of writing I've brought with me, but this time it struck me how quickly holidays start to feel like ordinary days when I'm duty-bound to do anything other than eat, sleep and attend to the rituals of basic hygiene. Please understand that I'm all for the nose-to-the-grindstone approach when it comes to writing, and I place a good deal of faith in perspiration, but there's something to be said for a total and guiltless break every now and then. It's good for creativity too: once or twice, as I was sitting around at my most relaxed and vacant, I could have sworn I heard some Ideas bestirring themselves in the miry depths of my subconscious.

* Four days in, one did so, but I recovered fully within the week.

Bermersbach: A good place for mental vacancy

Maybe I was particularly tired this time, or maybe its a symptom of parenthood, or encroaching middle age, but the best parts of this holiday involved sitting in front of a beautiful view and staring at it semi-vacantly with a cup of coffee in my hands and a book open on my knees. (Actually, come to think of it, this is always the case for me, on all holidays. The idea of "encroaching middle age" is just a glamorous fantasy, given that I've been like this since I was about 13.) On this occasion my vacuous coffee-drinking sessions took place on a balcony overlooking a broad, undulating valley of trees,and the picture-perfect town of Bermersbach with its green-spired church and timber-framed houses. In the hot sunshine at four o'clock the forest looked soft and dusty, like an old tapestry. There were clusters of bluer, leafier trees here and there - or so I thought until I realised I was looking at the shadows of the clouds (themselves, very white, small and slow-moving). Naturally, I thought about the Brothers Grimm. Into just such a forest, and from just such a town, did Hansel and Gretel follow their father and stepmother one day...

Into the woods...

We went to Baden-Baden towards the end of the week. As a tourist I didn't warm to it (why not? Too moneyed? Too eerily quiet? I can't put my finger on it) but from a writerly point of view it felt rich. Once you left behind the main street with its minimalist boutiques, and toiled up the steep cobbled hill, past discreet doctors' clinics (no flashy advertising, just little brass plaques on doors indicating the office of Dr. this and Dr. that, or a Psychosomatische Klinik) you reached the church. It was so quiet up there that it was positively ghostly, and when I passed on to the old thermal baths, with their grand colonnades, weedy paving stones and cracked paint, it wasn't too hard to imagine myself back into the nineteenth century: a Russian aristocrat in a bath chair, pale under a heap of rugs, on her way to take the waters.

Secretive Baden-Baden