Nine years. First real holiday. Left my manager in charge, turned the phone off, went to Portugal with my wife.

The business was fine. Better than fine. Revenue was normal. Nothing broke. Nobody needed me. My manager handled a problem that I would have handled worse, and handled it in a way I wouldn’t have thought of.

I came back to a business that had not missed me.

And I’ve been in a genuinely strange mood about it for a fortnight, because I have spent nine years believing that if I stopped for a moment the whole thing would fall over, and that belief is the reason I have missed a lot of things. Birthdays, a funeral, most weekends.

It turns out the thing I was protecting could look after itself, and the person who needed me to be indispensable was me.

I don’t know what to do with that yet. Booking another week in September.