The Occy book is now officially a national bestseller, so thanks to everyone who has bought it. Appropriately enough, it’s success has helped afford me and my family an Italian holiday, Occ’s ancestral home. And by the end of a month here, I may well be lookng like Occy circa 1994, in need of a year on the couch to recover. Supporting a family as a freelancer writer can be a precarious business at times, so this is a welcome reprieve.

It is certainly different travelling without surfboards - only the second time I have done it in the last 20 years, but is incredibly refreshing to leave the surfing world behind for a while. An Italian holiday neatly replaces the customary focus on waves with a focus on food. Each day you awake, keen to track down the day’s most appealing food options, hunting down little out of the way places along country laneways on the strength of some whispered rumours of a classic home made pasta, focaccia, local wine, cheese or truffles. Elluding the tourist hordes of Rome, Florence and Venice, and discovering one’s own little secret spots only inhabited by a close-knit local crew is also part of the game.

The Italians are the lifestyle masters, and it is easy to understand their sense of cultural superiority once you see how they have evolved their way of life over generations - and their refined tastes in fashion, architecture, wine, and art. There are easy natural rhythms to the days, like the oscillations of the tides - large family meals, long leisurely siestas, apperitivos before dinner, passegiata after dinner. It is not hard to get used to. And there is always the occasionally surfable Mediterranean coast or the islands of Sardinia and Corsica if I get desperate. Basing oneself here for a year or two to write a book, learn Italian and research the history of olive oil, all while only a short hop from the waves of the European Atlantic Coast, and the ski fields, is becoming a more attractive option by the day.

The Occy book has also been chosen as one of the “50 books you can’t put down” for the annual Books Alive promotion. Books Alive is an initiative of the Australia Council for the Arts to promote reading and each year they choose 50 new books they think will appeal to a broad cross section of readers. The Books Alive list is heavily promoted through book retailers and the media and everyone who buys one of the 50 Books Alive books receives a specially commissioned bonus Books Alive book for free - this year, a fascinating collection of short stories by various authors. Esteemed Australian author and historian Thomas Kenneally and UK TV interviewer Michael Parkinson are the faces of the Books Alive promotion this year and there is an hilarious clip of them on the Books Alive website discussing this year’s books, and vowing that they will both read all 50 books on the list. What exactly Thomas and Parko will make of Occy remains to be seen.

Mushroom Pictures has also optioned the film rights for the book, and I have been commissioned to write a film treatment based on the book, and a certain eminent Australian writer/director has also been consulted for his own take on the story. The question of who would play Occy is an intriguing one, and a certain young Australian actor and surfer, currently a bit of an It boy in LA, has expressed his keenness for the role and even his willingness to learn to surf switchfoot as a goofy.