I have long being doing, or trying to do, most of my work at home. This involves writing, watching and listening to stuff and an awful lot of reading. Somehow, heroically, I manage to do a little of all of these things despite the cacophony of distractions.
Consider the fridge and the kitchen cupboards. There is just so much in there to be thought about, resisted, thought about again, nibbled at, put away, nibbled at again, put away again, taken out once more and finally polished off.
During this enervating ritual, I might chance upon a foodstuff I have not noticed for a while and see that it is approaching its best-before date. I will try to get back to my laptop, but the, say, old pack of silken tofu will niggle away at me; it will become a scratch I have to itch. Before I know it, I am leafing through cookbooks, my massive file of cut-out recipes and the entire world wide web. I will find something that excites me. Usually, it will have a dozen or so ingredients, all of which I will have – bar one. But now I really have to, absolutely must, cook this thing. I will pop to the shops after I have done a bit more work.
I go back to the laptop and see something I need to print out. Unfortunately, the printer inexplicably won’t print, which feels like an total affront. All work, even meal planning, must stop for the printer to be fixed. Nothing else matters. I can’t possibly do any more work until this calamity is resolved. I turn the printer and my laptop off, then back on again. I do this several times, until the printer eventually starts working. By this time, I have clean forgotten what needed to be printed in the first place. But I do see that an ink cartridge needs to be replaced. What with that and the missing ingredient, a trip to the shops can’t wait a moment longer. Off I go.
It has been like this, or a version of this, every day for as long as I can remember. So, when a friend of mine, a proper writer, suggested we rent a tiny office space, in desperation, I agreed. Here we sit, typing away, facing each other across a small desk. It works, for me, anyway, like a dream. He has this incredible ability just to sit and work for whole minutes and even hours at a time. This means I have no choice but to do exactly the same. There is no food in this bare cell, just two jars of herbal tea (chai and rooibos) that I have been trying to get through for years. I get lots of tea drunk and plenty of stuff written.
I am put in mind, not for the first time, of something Alexei Sayle said years ago: “The secret of being funny is having funny friends.” I have been nicking my funny friends’ funny lines all my career. Now I find that the secret of focusing on writing is to have a friend to sit with who is good at focusing on writing.
The trouble is, this friend of mine has a lung condition and I am frightened of breathing potentially offending droplets in the poor bloke’s direction. So, I am writing this back at home. Since I sat down three hours ago, I have made my daughter her tea and, in doing so, chanced upon an old bag of red lentils. With that, I have made a Moroccan-flavoured dal I found a recipe for on a vegan website. While cleaning up, I noticed the dishwasher was making a dreadful noise. I spent 15 minutes finding the handbook, which advised that the problem might be a foreign body in the drain pump or non-return valve. No, me neither. A vein pulsing on my temple, I set about the matter at hand. This was a bad idea. As any member of my family will confirm, there is no technical problem I can’t make worse by attempting to solve it. But I pressed on; it was, after all, something other than what I was supposed to be doing, and that is the main thing.
Eventually, I found a small nail in the impeller. I am 53 on Saturday, and in all my days I have neither successfully repaired anything nor come across the word impeller. To my consternation, I managed, with the impeller newly nail-free, to reassemble the appliance without breaking anything. And, joy of joys, the noise is no more. Such a welcome shaft of light in these dire times. I am now seriously thinking of descaling a shower head. I will let you know how that goes.
The dal was great, by the way. Who knew Moroccans were so into lentils? I do now, because I have just frittered away another 15 minutes Googling it. But I am bang out of red lentils. Better get off to the shops to pick some up.
Adrian Chiles is a Guardian columnist
