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The Holiday

The woman on the sun bed next to me finished applying her Lancaster sun lotion to her already bronzed skin, stretched luxuriously and arranged herself on her Ralph Lauren beach towel. She leant over and reached into her Louis Vuitton tote bag and brought out a tiny i-phone and popped the headphones into her ears, this was followed by a sleek pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses which covered her eyes and then finally a copy of Vogue which she started to flick through lazily. She had been on the same nearby sun lounger for the past four days and although she hadn't said much, occasionally she would receive and send texts, seemingly oblivious to the beeped alert when someone made contact with her.

I, on the other hand, had only just finished gathering up all the children's clothes and shoes that they had scattered in their hurry to race each other to the pool. I sorted out three of the remaining sun beds and positioned one so that I could keep a constant eye on the two sleek headed bodies that were splashing and diving around each other like otters. I finished folding the towels and bent down to retrieve a Frisbee that had been kicked into a nearby bush, finally I located the sun cream, ready to apply another layer when they came back for drinks and snacks. Slowly I sat down on the side of the white plastic lounger, deciding that I had about an hour before people would start to want their lunch and I would need to dash into the small supermarket to buy bread before it shut.

As I sat barely aware of the noise of other holiday makers around me, my thoughts drifted to the as yet undefined sense of unhappiness that had been washing over me whenever I let my mind wander. For the past two or three years, I had the feeling that I was becoming increasingly invisible to the people around me. The children had started to develop their own interests and hobbies and although they were only 6 and 8 it was Brownies, Cubs, football, ballet and swimming that now had to be prioritised into the daily routine. This left me feeling that I had become more of a Domestic Co-ordinator' and of far less importance as a parent, which left me empty and lonely.

When it came to my relationship with my partner that's where I felt that the real sense of separation had grown most strongly. Right from the very beginning, it had been clear that a petro-chemical engineer would always be able to command a far higher salary than a financial advisor in a bank, so when the children came along, rather

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