My primary aim for the two-week holiday which I'm now about two thirds of the way through was to catch up on my scary sleep deficit and stop feeling like the walking dead. I think this has been pretty much achieved; yesterday I woke up with a restless urge to do something interesting and start a new project.

I was admittedly then disheartened when the project I attempted turned out not to work terribly well, but I expect that to happen every so often: even with my fairly risk-averse habit of thinking carefully about something before I set finger to keyboard, there will still turn out to be cases once in a while where something unforeseen makes the project impossible or much harder than I'd thought or causes me to go a long way down a blind alley. These things happen. It might still be salvageable.

A lot of my relaxation for the past week has revolved around using emulators to rediscover computer games from my childhood. I've tried this a few times before with varying degrees of success, but last week I managed to do significantly better than before in finding versions of my favourite games which could (for example) be played right to the end without crashing, and which didn't suffer from strange keyboard handling bugs. So in the past week I've accomplished one or two things that I tried and failed to do when I was thirteen, which is nice.

Also I've just finished reading ‘The War of the Flowers’ by Tad Williams. Tad Williams has a tendency to write things that are too long, either slightly or massively: his ‘Memory, Sorrow and Thorn’ series is only a bit too long and is good apart from that, but the ‘Otherland’ series was at least three books too long. So when I saw a one-volume stand-alone – i.e. short – Tad Williams work in the bookshop, I thought it had to be worth a try, and in fact I really enjoyed it.

So all of that has been pretty good in general; but the major success of the last ten days has been in the area of food. I've discovered that Sainsburys sell gluten-free fish fingers and chicken kievs, the latter of which in particular is a comfort food I've definitely missed since being diagnosed coeliac. I've also discovered that their packaged egg fried rice is gluten-free, which is good because although I can now cook a couple of halfway plausible Chinese-like meals I have as yet not managed any credible attempt at EFR. And a visit to my family the weekend before last introduced me to ‘Real Foods Corn Thins’, a biscuity snacky thing which appear to be the ideal GF base on which to spread things such as sardines if you can't be bothered with the lengthy hassle of preparing GF toast. As a result of all this, the range of things I'm able to eat and enjoy has expanded by quite a lot within the last week; in addition, the extra time granted by being on holiday has given me the leisure to cook for myself more than usual, so this has been a gastronomically varied and good week.

I might or might not actually manage to do something seriously productive with the remaining few days of my break. I generally hope to, but try not to push myself too hard because there's no point in trying to force enthusiasm and energy to appear. I have at least managed to rest convincingly without finding my time taken up by endless annoying chores, and that's an achievement in itself for a holiday.