Holidays are great and this one was particularly good, being longer and more resolutely anti-work than usual. I was in no great hurry to get back, but couldn’t have asked for a better return to work week.

I returned to less than 200 emails in my in-box. My spam filter seems to work well and clearly most emails I receive are merely responses to those I send.

Lots of stuff had moved on in my absence. The majority of items on my long ‘to do NOW list’ were achievable and painless.

There was time in the rehearsal room with the Home of the Wriggler team. We had an almost secret pre-Edinburgh warm-up gig on Thursday night to an appreciative audience mostly composed of people who had been turned away when the show sold out earlier in the year.

I met with good people at Birmingham Royal Ballet, Birmingham Contemporary Music Group and MAC about various collaborations and commissions (their scam filters appear to be on the blink). I also spent a couple of hours talking to a two different theatre makers about projects they are looking to get off the ground, ‘helping’ them with some ‘advice’.

Now I’m on a cool train to Edinburgh – St.Matthew’s Passion discreetly on the headphones, a spare seat beside me, a power socket feeding my laptop, dusk on the horizon and five further hours uninteruptable thinking time ahead. If the train were towards rather than away from the family everything would be perfect.

James