Doing this - working for myself, writing alone at a desk - was something that I spent most of my career thinking I’d never do. I am an extrovert with a capital E, and probably an exclamation mark (Extrovert!). If I am tired, I know that I will go out and see other people and feel less tired for doing so, even if it’s raining and I have to take the Metropolitan Line (jokes, I never take the Metropolitan Line).
This week, after spending most of the year so far sitting alone in The Hut with a keen eye on a word count and a vague awareness of my overly adrenalised state, I saw people with my working hours. I had meetings beneath the gilt cornicing of a converted church in the Square Mile and over bread-and-butter pudding at the Garden Museum. In the members’ room of the British Library, a friend and I worked in companionable silence, then broke in a Mexican restaurant around the corner. I was touched when an old friend and colleague travelled from Kent to my kitchen table so we could write and talk and thrash things out about the stuff we’re working on over a full packet of chipolatas.
It has been magic, and it has been confronting. Time is so strange, now, portioned into the hours I have when the baby is in childcare and when he is not. I negotiate daily with a puritanical work ethic that feels like a broken metronome. I am new in this job - of working for myself, writing alone at a desk - and I am bad at giving myself a grace period.
And so I am trying to do this. These hours are slippery and I’m struggling to make sense of them. There will always be too much to do. There will always be an email to answer or a dishwasher to load. But there are also snowdrops in the park, with nobody else looking at them.
Other good things this week: