Mild Panic.

I'm having one of those days today. Like when you lean back on a chair and the legs nearly give way but you just catch yourself and get that funny feeling in your stomach. I've felt like that all day today.

Some of this relates to my current workload which is slightly asphyxiating. Another factor is that Mel and I have become very disorganised over the last few weeks as we were caught up in the whole Christmas thing and then immediately drifted into holiday mode. There are piles of unopened post with different degrees of 'Urgent' written on the front. I am working my way through them but only at such a pace that my distress does not turn to panic. Last night I awoke in a sweat, remembering that I had not completed this years tax return which is due in tomorrow. I had done it, just not returned it which I have now remedied.

I think the unbridled optimism which I brought back from our holiday last week was pinned down and beaten round the head with the blunt instrument that was the football result on Wednesday night - which I am still finding very difficult to talk about. I should be used to dissapointment as a City fan of over 30 years but unfulfilled promise is so much more dissapointing than abject shitness. I shall make a note of that for future reference.

So this weekend (or the bit that I will not spend working) will be consumed by domestic tasks and head tidying. I'll get some exercise in between as that always helps the soul. I am also away from Thursday next week for four days at my companies annual sales-kick off event. I love and appreciate every minute I spend with Mel and I always feel robbed when I don't see her for a whole weekend.

My thoughts are also returning to our France project. We will be kicking it back into life in the next few weeks, our aim being to finish the barn conversion by the end of summer so that we can rent it out as a holiday home in 2011. Our next trip there will not be until the beginning of April and I genuinely yearn for some time there. As Mel often observes, I am only truly content and at peace with myself when I am at our place in France. The simplicity of life, the sights and smells of nature and the warmth of people there soothe away the stresses and strains of our life in the UK like nothing else. In the future, we will live there and I will fulfil my long harboured writing ambitions and catch carp whose surging runs will take my breath away. I often dream about that.

I feel incredibly lucky to have my in-laws right behind us in our project as without them we may have given up on our dream long ago. Fred, my father-in-law is the technical brains behind the project and what he doesnt know about the practicalities of construction and rennovation is well.......probably very little. Pat, my mother-in law provides the passion and vision and is always encouraging us and reminding us how great things will turn out once the project complete. It is so easy to forget that when your caught up in the maelstrom of corporate life and the drudgery of a UK winter.