Going on holiday, I may be some time.

As each day goes by, well, all four of them, I swing between thinking this is just a habit or it's a genuine addiction.
Yesterday I did my run, then went off to the Tate Modern to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibition, which had been recommended to me. I thought it would keep me out of the shops. It was huge fun, but I found myself getting ridiculously annoyed with the people around me. They constantly needed to take pictures on their mobiles, posing their children and keeping up a loud running commentary as they did it. I'm not normally a grumpy person, but in retrospect I'm starting to wonder if I wasn't behaving like a person who had just given up smoking,  I was behaving like an addict showing withdrawal symptoms.

But now I have to turn my mind to the serious question of what to take on holiday next week. The good news is that because I'm going to stay in rural Brittany with friends, I do not need to buy anything to look specifically elegant, glamorous, or anything else. So I'm getting off lightly. I choose and carefully place selected items on the bed in the spare room. There is one item that is new, but not newly bought. Namely a cream Uniqlo t shirt, because at the beginning of the season I bought two of these, yes, that's the sort of thing I used to do. It strikes me that the discipline I use to pack a case for a holiday is exactly the sort of skill I need to use when sorting out my clothes. More practical, less emotional. I must suppress the anxiety that makes me question whether I'm taking the right things. If this is what you've got, then this is what you'll have to wear, so you'd better get used to it. Ridiculously I am now in the position to go out and buy anything I want to wear, and I can more or less afford to do so. Now the planet cannot afford for me to do so, so I will have to stop.