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than try and juggle childcare and work, the most obvious solution had been for me to stay at home with them. For the first few years it had been brilliant and I had enjoyed the chance to spend so much time with them, but now the trajectory of my partner's career path had stretched the shared space between us to paper thin. It was hard to maintain any depth of conversation as we spoke to each other mainly on the phone; this was simply because being CEO of Project Development meant that working away for several weeks at a time had become the norm. The children had adapted to this quickly and were happy to have conference calls via web cams, but I missed the sharing of the little things, the personal snippets and jokes and was instead reduced to almost a checklist of; everything ok, kids ok, dog alright, school ok, any post? The other side of the conversation would be, are you eating enough, don't work too late, don't drink too much, (at yet another corporate do), and more and more I would hear tales of people I had never met and knew nothing about.

As I looked over at the woman as she relaxed on her sun bed, then beyond her to the various families and couples scattered around the pool complex, I became aware that I did not appear to be alone in my feelings of isolation. There were couples who were sat next to each other, but whose body language separated them by miles, people who had nothing left to say to each other and whose hard, thin-lipped mouths were set to endure the enforced duty of a family holiday.

Suddenly, it dawned on me that this was my life too. I was on holiday with a veritable stranger, a person with the same surname as me, but barely any other point of reference. The realisation seemed to suck the air from my lungs and I found myself almost gasping out loud.

I stood up, my legs unsure about their direction. I had seen a poster in the hotel reception advertising an afternoon trip to one of the nearby islands to look at the caves, but my enthusiasm for this trip had been swamped by my family's insistence to go to the nearby Water Parks, the Zoo and of course, to go shopping. As I set off on my leaden legs towards reception, the children were running back from the pool their voices whooping and their arms whirling. They skidded to a halt in front of me asking for juice and money for ice-cream. I told them that the drinks were in the big bag and put a coin into each palm and they vanished along a path towards the poolside shop.

When I returned to the small group of sun beds I was met by a chorus of voices wanting to know if they could go to Water World' that afternoon. I raised my hands to silence the noise, looked over at the woman on the lounger and said to the two bobbing bodies around my waist, "I can't go this afternoon as I have something planned, but why don't you ask your mother.."

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