My daughter found her squirrel pencil case and didn’t need her pink one anymore. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘You need one.’

This was news to me, but she’s still young enough to humour. I shook out my bag and put all my pens and pencils into the pencil case.

A week later, I read an article about stationary by Lucy Mangnan (who is nutty about stationary – I was part of a Radio Four programme she did about it). It talked about pencil cases and what women keep in theirs. Phone charge cords featured heavily.

I’m always losing my phone charge cord and not getting important calls. I started keeping my phone cord in my pink pencil case.

The pink pencil case is made out of oilcloth and patterned with butterflies. It has a little Velcro-shut pocket on the side. On my recent tour of externalling, I kept my receipts in there. It is the first time, ever, that I haven’t lost some of my receipts on a business trip.

My daughter was right – I did need a pencil case. I just didn’t know it.

I can’ t get too organised. I can’ t schedule every hour of every day. I need time to be able to say, ‘Hey, that’s a nice flower. I wonder what it would be like to be a bee and go inside. I know, I’ll stop my bike and use my lipstick mirror and get really, really close to the flower and write a little bit in my notebook about how furry and comfy it all looks in there.’ I need time to lie on my bed and worry that everyone writes better than I do. I need time to lie on the sofa and read and time to drive like a lunatic to the cinema so that I can watch a film I just read about on Twitter that starts in two minutes.

But I also need time to write and a place to go to do that. I’ve blamed work, my family, even the dog sometimes for not getting time to write. But, really, I just need to get a little more organised.

Just a little, mind…