Never a dull moment around here. The week before last, my wife, Sasha, went off to a far-flung corner of Co Kerry to stay at an old village abandoned during the great potato famine of the 1840s that has now been turned into an artists’ retreat.

Cill Rialaig (pronounced Kill Rillig) is located almost as far west as it is possible to go in Ireland without falling into the Atlantic.

The night before Sasha left, we loaded the car with bags of firewood because the place is so far beyond windswept there’s not as much as a dead tree in sight. Unfortunately, the only heat source in the stone cottages, which double as studios, are solid fuel stoves, so it’s “buy your own wood” unless you fancy getting out there with your shovel and cutting a little turf.

But from what, I wondered as I squeezed one last bag of kindling into the passenger seat to prevent the love of my life from being found iced over in her sympathetically gentrified hovel, was she retreating exactly?

We are so not assailed by the white noise of modern life. We live in the middle of a field. The whole “retreat” thing reminded me of the April Fool we sent to our family saying that we were moving to France because Ireland had got “too hectic” (they all believed us, which was rather disturbing).

Anyway, off she went the next day, with her pots of resin and an electric blanket, leaving me in sole charge of the children for the week (I went to bed every night at 9pm, wrung out like an old dishcloth, and realised fairly quickly what she was retreating from).

She got back late on Friday night; on Saturday we went to a christening and then on Sunday it was my turn to take a little time out from the hurly burly of family life on a mini-cruise to France.

Really, that’s what it’s called on the Irish Ferries website, a “mini-cruise”, as if you might be doing it just for the fun of the journey.

As comfortable as the ferry is these days (cabin with double bed and Sky TV, fruit bowl, internet and The Hangover showing in the cinema), and despite the journey from Rosslare to Cherbourg taking a substantial 19 hours each way, I think it’s probably fair to say that only the truly eccentric would sail back and forth from Ireland to France just for the hell of it.

The motivation for my wait-and-return to Normandy (I left on Sunday and returned on Wednesday) was to pick up €14,000-worth of windows from a French DIY store for the house we are building, not to experience a budget QE2. I’m sufficiently un-Zen to prefer destinations to journeys.

Or so I thought.

But blessed with beautiful sunshine, flat seas, a pod of leaping dolphins and a winning streak on the fruit machine that left me a cool €6 up, my solo mini-cruise turned out to be exactly what the doctor ordered. Three days of doing exactly what I wanted — reading, sleeping, drinking tea and lying with my eyes half closed, dozing in the sunshine on those little wooden benches on deck, thinking about my life, or not, as the mood struck me.

However, the ultimate luxury was that when we were finally summoned to the vehicle deck in Ireland, I was actually bored for the first time since my son was born three and a half years ago — and a dull moment or two makes for a treat of a retreat, as I think any hard-pressed dad would agree.

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