Like anything one is trying to nurture, writing takes time and effort.

Although it is considered a mainly cerebral activity, writing also needs physical space, somewhere to hide the scripts you might come back to, stack the books you mean to read, and scatter the pencil sharpenings as you launch into the next literary venture.

I adore my writer’s desk, a skip-dip treasure, rescued during a staffroom refurbishment.

It had been hidden behind the school stage as an occasional drama prop for the best part of twenty years. Before that it had been shipped up from a Sisters of Mercy convent school in Guernsey, the motto of which was Semper Fidelis, Always Faithful. I imagine a cowled, wimpled nun sitting upright behind it, sternly overseeing her charges.

The desk survived the German occupation of the Channel Islands, and the journey up North, intact. In its more recent history, it…