Work, and the complete lack of it.

Monday 14th December

Distraction is the biggest killer in my line of non-work.

The whole point of the exercise was that I would have time to sit and write but the biggest killer has been all the distractions available.

Dave Gorman was right in saying that the internet is filled with everything in the universe ever, and there's nothing more distracting than having everything in the universe ever at the touch of your fingers, but he's wrong because there actually is worse than that.

See, the internet revolves around activity and interactivity so you actually have to click on things and more to the point you have to have some form of imagination to go out and seek that which you might want to look at.

I'll give you a clue, there's only so many funny cat videos out there, after that you're just repeating yourself.

No, the real killer is the TV.

That big black rectangle in the corner of the living room is a disgraceful waster of time, you don't even need to do anything with it, just point your eyeballs in its direction and you're away. Combine that with SKY+ and a DVD player and you never need to move until your body gives in to a sedentary lifestyle and bacteria start to evolve into sentient lifeforms on various parts of your body.

So I am forced to admit that so far over the past few weeks, while I was supposedly working on the greatest novel since Winnie the Pooh went Dogging, I have seen every episode of House, Monk, CSI Vegas, Chuck, Big Bang Theory, Burn Notice, Fringe and many many more.

Well, no more.

My brain rebelled.

Actually, my brain was fine with it, it was my body that put it's metaphorical foot down this time. After the third bout of being violently ill which I put down to food poisoning, more likely now to be abject laziness I had to do something, and more to the point I had to get away from the big neon square and get down to some work.

After two hours in Starbucks waiting for somebody to notice that I was writing a novel on my laptop I realised that nobody gave a toss because everybody else was waiting for a similar audience. That and the fact that I had similarly lost a few billion quid on coffee made me realise that this might not be the best idea in the world ever.

So I migrated to Café Nero. Same problem.

So I migrated to MacDonalds. Though I was hungry the regular custom in MacDonalds is so unused to seeing somebody working or even capable of reading, never mind independent thought I thought it might be best to get out of there before one of the denizens got any funny ideas and before I was in danger.

So I migrated to a library. They were fine with me working on my laptop for huge chunks of time, though they did object to me watching hardcore pornography in between bouts of creativity. They also were not receptive to the idea that it was purely research.

So I migrated to B&Q. This was a happy medium, there was a café that was virtually empty, nobody bothered me but at the same time nobody took an order from me, no matter how patiently I waited. On the third day I discovered that there was no café in B&Q and I had been sat in the lighting section for two days.

They were also not impressed by my using of the bathroom aisle every couple of hours.

However on the way out of B&Q I was virtually tackled by another member of the sales force who wouldn't actually let me out of the door until I had explained my entire home renovating needs to him. It did take me a while to explain to him that I had no actual need to renovate my house and was just looking for a way to escape Hugh Laurie's face.

After chaining me to a fence in the outdoors section he did beat out of me the concept that Hugh Laurie's face was only scowling at me from one corner of one room of my house. I had at least three more corners to stare at, and that was just in that single room.

I had an idea.

People generally run scared when they hear that line.