People often assume writers live highly organised lives.
Calm mornings. Neatly arranged desks. Deep intellectual thoughts while sipping artisan coffee beside a spotless laptop.
Then there’s me . . .
My brain operates less like a sophisticated creative studio and more like a supermarket trolley with one broken wheel hurtling downhill into traffic.
For years, I’ve carried around little black notebooks everywhere I go because my mind refuses to behave like a normal person’s.
Ideas arrive at completely inappropriate moments. In queues. On trains. Halfway through conversations. Occasionally, during sleep itself.
If I don’t write them down immediately, they disappear into the universe forever, alongside missing socks and passwords you were certain you’d remember.
At this point, I own around 60 notebooks, which means my house now resembles the archive room of a detective who’s been investigating nonsense for decades.
Inside these books are thousands of observations, jokes and fragments of thoughts that made perfect sense at the time. Reading them back later is like trying to decode messages from a deeply confused time traveller.
One note simply reads: “Man arguing with seagull. Seagull winning.”
Another says: “Why do dads become airport security managers at 4am?”
Apparently, at some point, I considered both Pulitzer material.
The truth is, this is how my mind works all day long.
I notice tiny ridiculous details most people walk past.
Awkward conversations. Strange behaviour. The bloke in Tesco talking passionately to avocados. The woman aggressively overtaking pensioners with a trolley like she’s qualifying for Silverstone.
My brain collects these moments constantly, whether I want it to or not.
The downside is chaos.
My handwriting now looks like a doctor filling out a ransom note during an earthquake. Some nights I wake up convinced I’ve had a genius idea, only to discover I’ve scribbled something incomprehensible like “sad penguin energy.”
But, honestly, I wouldn’t change it.
Because . . . somewhere inside all that madness, confusion and random observations is the strange little engine that keeps me laughing, writing and making sense of the wonderfully bizarre world around us.