It’s 15 minutes until 1 am. My husband and our guests are downstairs, still drinking homemade elderberry wine and eating chocolates. My daughter is sleeping in our room tonight, nine feet from where I type, and will be for the next seven nights. Tomorrow I’m catering for seven people and doing last minute Christmas things.

There’s not much opportunity to write.

There was a time when I wrote even on Christmas day. But that was before there was a little person waking up at dawn to see what Santa left; and before I graduated from Christmas lunch consumer to Christmas lunch provider.

I choose  to do all the things I do. I believe that to to make good art, you need to live as well as work. Otherwise, you start making sterile, ghastly things. As animals, we need to defecate, of course. But we need to eat, too. And just as you can’t poo without dining, you can’t make interesting, useful art without having full and interesting experiences outside your artistic practice.

So my word count may not be spectacular over the next few days…but somehow I think that a Christmas in a two up, two down terraced house with my 70 plus in-laws, our dear friend Rick (the industrial techno musician) over from Prague to sort out his visa, my wine-loving husband and my nine year old daughter will be terribly interesting. And I’m sure I’ll use what’s about to happen later.

Today I eat. Tomorrow I’ll make something out of it.