My book is in the shops!

and the Ceramics Study Galleries are open - the two major projects I have given all my time to over the last several years are successfully complete, and I am becoming increasingly aware of an unfamiliar feeling of aimlessness in my extra-curricular time. It's not that I don't have research or writing projects I could be doing, I just don't want to be doing them - or rather, I feel that I have earnt some time off from them, just that I don't really know what it is that normal people do with their free time. I suppose part of the problem is that K has two article deadlines to meet, so he is writing writing writing, so I can't make any plans for us to go off and do things together at the weekend. And I quite enjoy luxuriating in the pure fact of having nothing to do.

But I have read enough of the LRB and my current book, The Rings of Saturn (which I have to say I am not enjoying nearly as much as I ought to be - especially since it is one of K's most beloved books), and have caught up with the Guardian profile of Simon Mawer and review of his recently-Booker-nominated The Glass Room - the book I read on holiday, which was such a wonderfully evocative portrait of a Modernist building that when I eventually brought myself to look at photographs of the Tugendhat House in Brno, Czech Republic, upon which it based, I felt I had already seen it... I have caught up with a good few long-overdue emails, and we have even started to arrange to see people again!

I feel like I am re-emerging from a long period of hibernation, but am out of practice where basic social pastimes are concerned - perhaps because our habit over the last years has been to do our research in all the spare hours we can carve out from the day. I made a conscious decision early on in my working life to maintain an active academic strand alongside my job - of course those things should cross over more than they do - but I feel I have now got to the stage, especially now that I have been promoted, where I do not have anything to prove any more, and I am grateful for that. But it is difficult to suddenly learn to relax when you've never really been sure of how to do it! I have done quite a lot of cooking - hours in the kitchen last night producing Ottolenghi's turkey and sweetcorn meatballs, and as always with meatballs I am not sure that the end result really justified the hours of faff; I have even done all the washing up (things must be bad!).

This lull is also actually only a brief window before embarking on the next book project - in August, I am using up 5 weeks of my accumulated leave (having not really taken any holidays over the last few years) to start focusing on how to turn my thesis into a book. I haven't looked at it for 8 years, and don't really want to think about it at all before 2 August - when I plan to pitch my metaphorical tent in the British Library for the duration (people who don't realise I am not going on a month's holiday say, "I hope you're going somewhere nice"!) - so I am trying to get my ducks in a row (scans from Spanish colleagues of articles that have come out in the last 8 years, a sense from EUP - where I plan to propose it - of what I should have achieved by the end of August) without really engaging my brain, since I want to come to it absolutely fresh when I finally sit down and re-read it. I am hoping that the intervening years and publishing projects will make it immediately obvious to me what it needs, but I also don't want to do too much rewriting, mainly restructuring and reducing. But who knows what will possess me.

In the meantime, we're having a glorious summer and I really should be outside. Thank goodness we have the Lambeth Country Show next weekend!