That holiday feeling (From Stroud News and Journal)

That holiday feeling

OH that holiday feeling. Gone already.

It lasts all but a nanosecond.

Or that's how it seems on returning from a locale far-flung and exotic or, indeed, just returning from somewhere else...to work.

Does anyone enjoy the return - even those blessed with one of the more fulfilling jobs on this planet, of which I count myself one?

I feel able to speak on this subject with relative and recent authority, for this is my first week back at the copy coalface after a week carving up the snow slopes of the Alps.

And carve them I did, being a self-confessed slope cowboy, without the good fortune to be introduced to this exquisite recreation until my mid-teens.

Unlike, that is, the three-year-old toddler racers cutting me up in the icy fastlane.

This was as invigorating and rejuvenating holiday as I have had in many a year.

Azure blue skies, squeaky virgin white snow, daylong exercise, nightlong excess, the Beckhams in the next door valley and rather less excitingly the Wessex's in ours.

As healthy a balance as this life has to offer, it seemed to me at the time.

Returning tanned, at least as far as the Adam's Apple, fit (-ter than for at least a decade) and refreshed, I bounded back into the office on Bank Holiday Monday (yes, in retrospect, not an auspicious omen) and sat down at my computer.

And with that, in a moment as mysterious as it was heartbreaking I lost that holiday feeling.