Sunday night blues

Come to think of it, I probably enjoyed the weekend mainly because it was the weekend. The weeks are a little harder - not because I have to go back to work, but because I haven't any work to do. I dispatched the proofs of Moneypenny 3 nearly three weeks ago. It's over: four years of pretty constant writing, always knowing what's next, another deadline hovering over the horizon. And however much that felt like some kind of pressure, now it's gone, I don't know quite what to do with myself. I spend half the time thinking that I need to step away from the great greasy grindstone, consume less, enjoy simplicity - and the other bit feeling vaguely panicky about what's next. I don't have another book chafing to come out, and I'm not convinced I want to jump right back into it. But I can't fiddle the days away doing nothing either.
It's confusing. The world is heading towards some kind of cataclysm - a result in great part of our behaviour, our greed and need to achieve, consume, fly - but that's also what we've been programmed to strive for. If I don't feel I've been productive somehow, by the end of the day I'm ratty. But what's it all for, this 'productivity'? To enable us to eat more, go faster and send our children to better schools? Why, though? Surely the way in which we're going to be able to ride the future is to want less, to be able to fend better for ourselves. In Kenya a couple of years ago, in our tiny village away from any town, where most people couldn't afford shoes and the children kicked around a football made of elastic bands, they still seemed happy, enviously so. And I couldn't work it out. They had little to hope for, yet they laughed more than we did, had a greater capacity for kindness. I wondered whether it was too late for us to achieve that kind of contentment - though in so many ways, I felt it more there, in the sounds of the bush waking and the great skies, than I ever do here, amid my comfort.
So what is it I should be doing now, with the children at school and no deadline? Should I scrabble for a new project, a route to royalty payments and a sense of achievement? Should I be pushing for a book tour of the US, so I can persuade more people to part with $20 in return for a couple of hours of escapism? Or should I read a book, or dig the garden? Or just go back to bed and wait until it's pick-up time - and then bring the children home and, instead of flustering over homework, let them do exactly what they want?
Sometimes I wish I didn't know what I do. I wish I could continue consuming and producing at an accelerating rate. In a funny way, that was so easy.