My ideal writing day goes something like this: wake up when I wake up - whenever that is. Glance at the clock and feel a lazy glow of gratitude that my sleep is shattered by an alarm only on those rare occasions when I have an early plane to catch. The rest of the time the only thing urging me out of bed is the prospect of breakfast at whichever is my favourite cafe in whichever city I happen to be living.
My first weeks in any city are always devoted to the kind of diligent, painstaking research that is second nature to a novelist. Researching what, you ask? The breakfast situation, of course, visiting different cafes comparing the relative merits of coffee and croissants versus distance from home. After three weeks I will have settled on one particular place where the croissants and coffee are consistently to my liking.
After breakfast, I stroll home, turn on my trusty laptop and settle down to the serious business of the day: checking my emails in the hope that they include an invitation to write about something or somewhere as far away as possible. In the afternoon I play tennis, nursing fantasies that it is Martin Amis on the other side of the net, whom I crush in three devastating sets. After tennis my girlfriend and I go to bed for an hour or two. Then we go to the cinema (even in the context of an ideal day this has an unrealistic, elegiac quality to it since there is rarely anything worth seeing at the cinema now) and, afterwards, go for a cheap dinner (expensive restaurants are boring) with friends.
On Saturdays this gruelling schedule is relaxed somewhat in that we go out dancing and get back as it is getting light. Sunday, as a consequence, is spent taking it very easy, listening to music, drinking a few beers in the evening and going to bed early.
It is on days like these - days when I don't have time even to think about doing any writing - that I consider I am living to the full the life of the writer, i.e. being free to do what I want.
You don't need holidays if you are doing what you want all year round. I am at work 365 days a year, I am on holiday 365 days a year.
I write when I feel like it, don't when I don't, so, really, there is no distinction between work and leisure. All I do is live my life.
Anglo-English Attitudes: Essays, Reviews and Misadventures 1984- 99 has just been published by Abacus. £12.99 in UK