I’ve been back at my desk three days complete and not yet written a word. The usual pattern after a trip, when the practicalities of life have mounted up and getting back to the book is always the next thing to do after picking up the dry-cleaning. Dry-cleaning is something here. Not so much a minor domestic detail as a life project. She opens 9.00 till 12.55, but not Mondays and only when there’s an R in the month. At 12.55 she closes for the sacrosanct three hour lunch. At 4.00 she might re-open. Or not.

Then there are the random misfortunes that can close down any one-woman business just like that. A little hand-written note Scotch-taped to the window, closed due to family reasons, and there go your best trousers till early June.
Meanwhile this one-woman business tries to keep going, creaking back into action with a half-written chapter that’s gone cold. My theory is something half-written is easier to return to than something neatly tied off, but like all theories it doesn’t always stand up to the test. Where did I intend going with this? What can I have been thinking of? My trousers, possibly, and how to spring them from a dark and shuttered dry-cleaner’s shop.

And to add to my guilty sense of sloth, I’m reading Peter Ackroyd’s biography of Charles Dickens. All those books, the journalism, the amateur dramatics, dinners and speaking engagements, ten mile hikes, house moves, furniture rearrangement and various other manifestations of control-freakery.

Now there was a man who just couldn’t stop. An inspiration to a woman who’s had difficulty getting started this week.