This week a magazine asked me (and lots of other people) what my ideal conditions for writing are. I chose silence - though I dithered over normal domestic background noise, as that's what I normally write to.
Today, I was in writer's hell. Everyone was out so I should have been in heaven. I had some copy to write - three pithy statements about a London homeless charity. I'd loads of material and ideas and made great headway, until half way through the afternoon when I suddenly became horribly aware of the builders' cement mixer.
They're working next door and have set the mixer up in the front garden - about ten feet from my office window. It's been running for weeks now (they're doing some serious brickwork) so why, today, did it make me scream with frustration? I had to give up writing and stamp about. I had a shower. I put coffee cups in the dishwasher. I footled on Google, though I really didn't have time to mess about.
Eventually, they went home. And I got back to work, brain refreshed from its compulsory break.
The funny thing is that several years ago, I wrote a book. And I wrote the whole thing while we had builders in our house, on a decrepit borrowed laptop because my office was the only room not being rebuilt, so it was stuffed to the ceiling with furniture, pots and pans, and anything we needed to keep clean of builders' dust.
There was no way I could work in there. So I moved around the house, my sources in a box at my feet, my ears filled with hammering, boots running up and down the stairs, and the latest gossip from that day's Sun (I never did persuade them to read the Guardian). And I really don't remember ever struggling to write, no matter what was going on, and despite often being shattered from working through the night because I had so many words to write and so little time.
Have I become soft?
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