After a hectic weekend between Sligo and Dublin (for the Irish Web Awards), on Sunday night I hopped on a plane to Dubai, a holiday long talked about but only booked a week ago today. The opportunity to get away and do nothing doesn’t arise all that often.

I managed a long weekend in Amsterdam this March, a precursor to “the wedding” in Portugal, where I hadn’t told anyone I was working with at the time that I was going and as a result continued to work for all but one of the days I was there. This time around, it’s a bit different.

Coming to Dubai for the ten days or so gives me the chance to do nothing. I’ve been here before, covered a lot of the tourist activities so if all I get to do is sit around the apartment for the day and watch TV or read through Gulf News or The National, then that’s perfectly fine by me.

It’s been a serious transition year for me work-wise, it’s been an incredibly busy year for me theatre-wise. I had to stop ordering books from Amazon as I haven’t read more than the first chapter in each book since the beginning of the year. I’ve stopped one magazine subscription and I’m close to stopping another as it’s taking me a month to get to taking the magazine out of it’s plastic postage wrapper. This past weekend was also the first in at least six months that I’ve been able to see the family en masse in Sligo such is the way things have been going.

Of course in the rush to get out of the country I left behind my headphones, sunglasses and camera. I actually can’t remember a break I’ve taken away where I have remembered to bring headphones with me. I’ve sourced a new camera here, a nice Canon Ixus 120IS so I can grab some photos so (to the family), I’ll have shots to bring home with me.

I’m letting things slow down, slow right down as in ten days time there’s projects to finish and launch, two theatre productions to oversee and a whole lot more on the cards.

But they can wait a week or so, right?