Diary – 4 September 2010

I have of late, for the most cheerful of reasons*, been getting up early to work. All well and good — deadlines have been met — but now I can’t break the worm-catching habit. Long before dawn the eyelids flutter open and the brain begins its spinning machine whirl. I force myself to stay in bed until five o’clock, the point at which I consider a late night to be baptised as an early morning — or in other words, the earliest acceptable moment to switch on radio and kettle. As the World Service gives way to the Shipping Forecast I sit down at my desk, wondering whether I would be better employed as a postman or dairymaid, or perhaps as a teasmaid at the Today programme. Mark Twain (and this is my favourite quote about the business of writing) said that ‘the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair’.