Just under 15 years ago we went to Cornwall on holiday. We stayed in a hotel which had been voted the UK's best for children and families the year before. Unlike many of our family holidays, I don't remember it with any great fondness. I got food poisoning and five of us (including an 8 month old who wasn't in the most user friendly sleep pattern) were in the one room. It was a very nice room but it still became like a pressure cooker as the week went on. I do remember being out and about under grey skies, visiting St Michael's Mount and Mousehole, and driving through Newquay on a sunny bank holiday Monday with squadrons of teenagers armed with super soakers firing water into every open car window they spotted. Our kids thought it was hilarious when a blast caught me full in the right ear. Looking back, I think I was going through an early midlife crisis, bound up in worries about money and responsibility, growing up and growing old. I think the grey clouds I remember were my own creation, following me around all week and maintaining a steady drizzle of self-doubt.
Oh dear. I hadn't expected this piece to go in that direction. And maybe it is important that it did, because something tangible and good came out of that gloom. I learned and resolved to never again be a miserable sod on holiday, and we visited a National Trust property and bought a scrawny little shrub. The house was Trerice. It was a small (by stately home standards) Elizabethan manor house and I remember how friendly the staff were to our children, what a warm, welcoming and homely feel the place had.
The shrub we bought was a ceanothus, and when we got back home we planted it against the sunniest wall in our garden and watched it grow. It thrived, bushing out and growing taller, bursting into an intense blue flowery cloud in the early summer, and after eight or nine years it was so large and solid looking that I suggested that we cut off the lower foliage and turn it into a tree that we could sit under. And that's what we did. You can see the result in the picture, our own blue grotto. It could become a nuisance when the flowers faded and died, covering anybody who brushed against it in a coating of blue-grey dandruff, but that was a small price to pay for the peacock splendour of its full bloom.
Disaster struck during the winter. The snow that was with us throughout January was something we'd never experienced during our time living here. It was exciting and spectacular, and it proved too much for the ceanothus. My idea of turning it into a tree, with its skinny trunk topped by an afro of branches and foliage, meant that it was top heavy and ill-equipped to cope with the weight of sustained heavy snowfall. One day my wife and daughter were looking out of the kitchen window when they heard a crack, and the largest of the branches collapsed into next door's garden. When I went out to look at the damage there were splits through all the branches. On Sunday I finally accepted the inevitable and began the process of cutting it down. On Monday morning I opened the curtains and looked out at the sad, savaged stump. The garden looks lost without it.
And, on reflection, I feel ok. The garden will recover. We've got an opportunity now to plant something new. The blues that I experienced 15 years ago are gone, the children are growing (the baby is now shaving) and moving out into the world, and I'm looking forward to summer, holidays, gardening and whatever new opportunities life throws up.
I realised how much I love places like that little bookshop and Chorlton Bookshop, a similar independent emporium close to my home in Manchester , and how at risk they probably are in the age of Amazon, Abebooks and Waterstones. I fear for them in these commercial, corporate times and I admire their character and their individuality. 
