People are funny — they keep asking me what I’ve been doing, when for me, the whole point of a vacation is to sit in a chair in a lovely spot and read books, interrupted, if I’m lucky, by stretches where I actually get some writing done. This is why, if you are leaving a beautiful house, with dogs, and a tricky koi pond, and you need someone who wants to hang around the house a lot, what you’re looking for is a writer (well, maybe not a poet — sometimes they don’t notice things like the koi pond pump…