So, we’re away. I always harboured slightly grand ambitions of using parental leave to travel about a bit, the logic being that babies are more portable (and less opinionated) than toddlers and neither of us would get a chunk of time away from our jobs to take our portable baby places again. At some point, when he was smaller, we figured that road tripping across Italy would work with a six-month-old in tow. I thought of swimming and weaning the baby on good tomatoes and pasta. I mostly thought of pasta.

I’m writing this as the baby naps, looking across the Adriatic at a lighthouse that spins lazily through the night. We’re in Vieste, the sharpest edge of the spur on the Italian boot. It’s October, and blustery; far too cold for the locals to be taking a dip but we have been because it’s warmer than where we’ve come from.

I unfurl on holiday. I slow down, I look longer, I stop caring so much. Driving up mountains and through forests is less idyllic with a scratchy baby in the back seat, but I still feel more myself for the newness of it. We are away for several weeks, long enough for funny little resolutions to creep in, an undeniable sense that when we go home - which will suddenly be dark and dank, perhaps with some kind of horrible admin in a brown envelope awaiting us on the doormat - we will emerge as improved versions of the people we were when we left.

M has taken up running again. I’ve just eaten pasta twice a day. But I have been thinking about whether I can live non-holiday life more like holiday life. Here are some good things I hope to hold onto:...