I’m making big plans for this winter. I’m stopping work completely and decamping to the Italian countryside as an experiment.
I’m testing the hypothesis that I will go mad on my own with nothing to do but write. I’ll be facing the one thing that, in many different ways, I’ve been fleeing for all these years: isolation.
It’s not that I’ll be completely on my own, however. I’ll have the network of acquaintances that I’ve made over the years there, with my dear old family friends at the heart of it.
But my work, my daily ritual, will change from being deeply connected with other people to a solitary ritual of walking and thinking, drinking coffee, and then filling up the blank page.
It’s a bit terrifying, really. I can’t find any evidence to convince myself that it’s a sensible thing to do. It’s lots of other things - but not sensible.

Yet this seems the right time to do it. I’ve reached the end of my time in London, gained all the qualifications I need to prove...well, whatever it was that I was trying to prove. I forget what that was now. I’ve still got enough of a wanderlust to keep me from settling down – but it's in search of a place to “settle” that has prompted me to quit Britain. I know that I could never do this in London. It’s an agitating, challenging city, constantly stimulating and testing.
In the middle of the hubbub, it’s hard to rest, difficult to calm down. So I’m on the move and I’ll see where I end up. I have no idea where I’ll be living this time next year. This is exciting and very strange.
However, by taking time out and going rural for a few months I hope to find out if I’m a stimulation junkie, unable to unhook myself from the metropolitan life-support machine. Or whether the cause of my agitation is indeed urban living. Once removed from it, will I begin to calm my inner self and clear my head?
The way I see it, things could go a number of ways. Perhaps, I'll fall flat on my face and write nothing at all. Maybe I will fill the page with words that turn out to be utterly lacking artistic merit.
A third scenario is the stuff of grandiose narcissistic nightmares: that I produce a work of such exquisite transformative elegance that it’s way ahead of my time. In such an event, of course, it probably won't get published. My genius will be recognised only after I’m dead. Therefore, I will go to the grave embittered and, probably, gin-sodden.
That’s a comfort then. The certainty of failure is always perversely satisfying when you nurse but don’t do anything about it.
It’s the sort of sick pleasure that you get from a loose tooth, rocking it slowly in its bloody cradle but not hard enough to pull it out. It means that your fantasies of gaining immortality through success and fame remain intact, pure. Unsullied by anything as mucky as reality or disappointment.
You keep on being reminded of the ache, every now and again, and vow to do something about it. You look at the first chapter of the novel, think up a few scenes in the screenplay. And then you put it away and quickly forget about it. One reason I’ve not pursued a novel or screenplay to date is that I've been waiting to fall in love. Somewhere deep in my subconscious, I’ve linked the idea of writing with the notion of a boyfriend, delighted to see me at the end of my day, chattily throwing a sauce over a pasta and pouring me a glass of red wine.
This haunting and unrealised vision of emotional security has been my stumbling block. It’s not going to happen like that for me. And so, a part of me has gone on strike, demanding better conditions. You see, my refusal to sit down and be creative is a sort of reproach to the gods. An attempt to punish them for being so mean. Pretentious? Self-pitying? Futile? Of course.
A fourth possible scenario is that my time in the countryside goes well, that people like what I produce there – and that it gets published.
Sometimes it’s not fear of failure that rules our lives. It’s fear of success.