Sarah Todd: Catching up with some old friends in my holiday reading

The first, Anna Sewell – The Woman who wrote Black Beauty, was quite heavy going but well worth the effort.

The blurb on the back described it as a "must for all horse lovers and all those who still raise a tear at the thought of Beauty in the orchard at Birtwick, standing with his old friends under the apple trees."

Although the long chapters about Sewell's strict Quaker upbringing didn't detain us too long from the all-inclusive bar, it was fascinating to discover the impact she had in promoting the humane treatment of horses. She was credited with abolition of the bearing-rein, the contraption that held carriage horses' heads artificially high as was the fashion in those days.

It was also interesting to discover that she'd suffered ill health from the age of 14 and finished writing her "little book"on her death bed.

On the other end of the seriousness scale was the latest instalment in the life of Adrian Mole, The Prostrate Years.

Sue Townsend's comic creation is now 39 and-a-quarter and living in the country (his glamorous wife refuses to buy any wellies) in a converted pigsty.

It made me laugh even more than the children's faces when they discovered that "some people aren't wearing any clothes" as they gambolled along the beach next to the hotel. Yes, trust us; we ended up next door to a nudist beach.

Without giving it all away, Adrian realises something's up when his wife goes to work for the local aristocrat Hugo Fairfax-Lycett and accepts his welcoming gift of, you've guessed, a pair of wellies. There's a picture in my mind of Hugo and doubtless he'd have shown Mrs Mole a good time at today's Grand National.

Not quite in the same league, but just as much fun and not as claustrophobic, we're going to a point-to-point tomorrow. We want to be there early, to see the pony racing which gets the day's proceedings underway.

The tooth? After three days on holiday and double doses of antibiotics it seemed to come right. We'd not been back home two minutes though when we learnt somebody had been stealing our daffodils, which set it all off again. It wouldn't have mattered if it had been a lovestruck young lad stopping to pick a few, but according to our mole (not Adrian) it was a lady who'd stepped out of a smart 4x4 vehicle. These daffs went in about a month after our son arrived in the September and a right job it was too, keeping an eye on a squawking baby and his toddler sister as cars sped by.

More flowers have now disappeared from the village. Sounds like the start of a holiday novel…

CW 10/4/10