If you've ever listened to 'You and Yours'

Consider the terrible fate that befalls so many who earn their living via their own pen. For a minuscule few this is the occupation as imagined: wads of money coming from royalties from the last two volumes, film rights from the first of these, and the hefty advance from the publisher for the one that's in the chamber. The work in progress being addressed from a table on the balcony of a Tuscan villa (the ninety day rule, you understand), a few hours every morning, then into town to be lightly interviewed by a visiting journalist before an afternoon and evening of sensualism and rest. Here and there a little pestering from one's agent, but that itself is only a form of flattery, easily fended off, should put yourself about a bit more to increase sales she says, but really why bother?

For all the other poor sods, oblivion. The economising, the doing just about anything that pays and involves writing so that one can maintain truth over the creeping fiction (hah!) that writing is one's occupation. The hundred word book reviews that generate about as many pounds in payment and hours in reading the blasted thing in the first place. The side pieces for magazines including (oh dear god no) trade publications. Running creative writing classes for the county council in some wire-mesh-windowed community facility. Always with financial consideration at the back of the mind, closely associated with the act of writing itself, rendering it a necessity, a nuisance, a burden. Work.

Being at home all day. Unnaturally attuned to the rhythms of the place, the postman's delivery, central heating switching off, noise of kids in the street a reminder that it's already twenty to four and nothing has got done. The time that can be taken in making your own lunch. Then the temptation to have a nap in the grey afternoon of this close, airless prison.

That's just if residing on your own, if living with another there's an inevitable list of tasks - explicitly written or tacitly understood. And if this actually doesn't prevent you from getting on with the job, it's nevertheless far too good an excuse to pass up ('There, cohabitee, I've done the ironing and fixed the door on the bathroom cabinet, but at the expense of the novel that was to define the latter half of the 20th century, I hope you're satisfied').

That's before anyone's even put a pram in the hall. Or a television in the living room. And don't get me started on the internet, bloody hell...

The temptation to allow 'local author' status sets in, leading to a stifling kind of prominence within the district, among other people who are never to be found more than the capacity of a weak bladder's distance from their own front doors. This would be fine in W11, NW3, Park Slope, the Cinquieme, where the pavements are regularly shaken by the tread of literary titans, but in Chiswick?

Then the writer's worst enemy lurking on every High Street - Ryman's. Even in parts of the country where functional literacy is at or near zero and there are fewer books in the entire conurbation than there are sitting beside the Andrex on my toilet cistern lid, there will always be a branch of this bland stationery shop. And in each you'll find at least one aspiring writer shuffling about in comfortable clothing, searching for the pen, the A4 binder refill pad, the print cartridge, the package of high gsm paper, that will in some way stimulate a creativity that has been so compromised by demeaning ill-use and suffocated by crushing domesticity. Hopeless.