I live in Hampstead, and my study is at the back of the house. I keep swivelling round on the chair, which has lost its arm somewhere, to look out of the window - I can just glimpse Keats House, where my grandmother was born, and the hideous 60s block of the Royal Free Hospital, where both my parents spent their last days before they died. Talk about full circle ...
I can also watch the local fox, which visits my chickens at dusk each day to check up on them, like a malevolent watchman.
The pills on the printer are to remind me to take my malaria tablets, because I'm just off to Ghana on a writing job. The coffee cup was made by my brother-in-law, David Garland, who's a potter. The brass fly next to it is filled with stubs from my roll-ups. I can't start writing without a coffee and a fag, which is pathetic, but still ...
The long string of photos shows a reunion of my university friends; their faces help me with a TV drama I'm writing about people my age. Casual snapshots - people just glimpsed on the off-beat - help to stir and trigger things in my head. I'm also writing a film about the Crimean war, and the yellow book in the foreground is by Alexis Soyer, the Victorian celebrity chef who went out there. That open script is the first draft of A Little Princess, which I'm adapting for the BBC; I'm trying to write the second draft but it hasn't warmed up yet; I'm just moving stuff around, like rearranging jigsaw pieces. With any luck it will suddenly come alive, but the phone keeps ringing and emails keep pinging, and then I start logging on to YouTube to look at kittens.
The newest addition to the bookshelf is an Obama chocolate bar, which of course I shall never eat. There are also several objects made for me by my partner, the cartoonist Mel Calman, who died before I moved to this house. He made me a little typewriter whose every key is a "D" and a cartoon of somebody sitting at their desk with a sign: "Please Disturb - Writer At Work".
