On having more time

As of Friday morning when I filed my weekly copy a day and a half late, I have more free time than I've had since the beginning of December 2009, when I began a stressful, mammoth task that was completed three months later, when I began, the next day (a coincidence), another task three times as mammoth but marginally less stressful. Now the Adelaide book is written and the manuscript is with the editor, with whom I will be conferring for the next couple of weeks and after that it's out of my hands till I get page proofs, to which I must not make any but tiny essential changes, on pain of death.

So what have I done with my time since Friday morning? Slept, faffed around online, had two lovely catchups with dear friends over Friday dinner and Saturday breakfast, and read most of a very good novel by Justin Cartwright about an old English banking family going belly up during the GFC. Of course that means there are still three and a bit more novels to read and write reviews of by the end of Wednesday, but I've been fitting that in around writing a book for the last year, so I'll probably be able to struggle along with it. Writing the book gave me all kinds of pleasures, some of them new and some of them fierce; it was an extraordinary experience. But I'm kind of ready for some nice familiar non-deadlined pleasures for a while.

Adders readers will know, if they saw last week's Adelaide Magazine, that the new tapas place on Semaphore Road (five or ten minutes' drive from my house) is the 'most genuine' in the city and fabulous with it. My friend R and I went for an early Friday night supper and had exactly the right number and combination of tapas for happiness and comfort, plus a glass of Sangria, also for happiness and comfort, and then went for a walk out to the end of the jetty, where we found a strange but harmless man in a beanie who wanted to explain to us why he was kicking dried seaweed back into the water, whence, presumably, it had come.

If you go at exactly the right time, you can listen to the waves shooshing underneath you and catch the little glints of light on the moving water out of the corner of your eye while you watch the sun set into the sea in gold and silver and deep pink and dark blue layers as you walk out to the end of the jetty, and then as you walk back you can watch all the gold and silver street lights and coloured signs and the lights in the windows of private houses coming on one by one against the indigo sky, along the shoreline and back up Semaphore Road. Hadn't done that for a very long time.