The Portuguese artist Paula Rego once said: “Work is the most important thing in life.” I agree with her. Work defines who we are in the world. It gives us purpose and direction. It is how we manifest ourselves in the sphere of public functionality. Without it, we might come to feel like less effective citizens, taking up physical space with less power to define the shape of our exteriority. I think that what Rego was implying was not that family or the other elements of our lives are not important, but that those things cannot exist in balance without the fact of work. Every day she would go to her studio and immerse herself in her paintings and prints, the nucleus of her existence. When it was finished, she would come out fulfilled, capable of full relaxation and communication with others. I am describing here something akin to my own optimum experience of work and transposing it on to Rego, because the satisfaction of and need for creative industriousness in the artist’s life is presumably common across disciplines. There is no bliss quite like the end of a successful writing day, when I have achieved a good word count, when I have travelled through the words arriving on the page and lost myself in it. Achievement, according to psychologists, is an essential human need, next to food and shelter. Writing regularly and often is crucial to my mental health and, especially while writing a novel, I like to work as consistently as possible – days off make me nervous.
I realise that there are parents out there who savour school holidays, who see them as a time of relief, a break from routine, a chance to spend quality time with the children. But it has to be said that the school holidays go on for an inordinate amount of time. Families do not need to spend that much time together. They need their dispersings and distances in order to come back to one another ventilated of small irritations and tetchy dynamics.
