My wife says I wake every morning shouting: 'Who's attacking me?' I do tend to wake up with anxiety.
A lot of writers are depressive - I tend more towards anxious and melancholic. I've always got plenty of nervous energy and I'm eternally keen to make something of the day. I believe if you put problems to bed, you wake up inspired, so I keep a pad and pen next to me to catch those early-morning thoughts.
My wife and I had a child, Samuel, eight months ago. He's changed our lives for the better, of course, but he does dominate the household. He might wake up any time from 5am to 7.30am. All parents know that much hangs on which way this goes. He's still relatively easy to look after. His needs are simple: food, entertainment and sleep. I've taken to looking at older children with fear - they want such impossible things: to stay up all night, to eat whatever they want, to watch TV all the time. It's frightening, all the disappointment that parents have to inflict on their children. What we call 'growing up' is, in essence, learning to cope with frustration.
The weirdest thing about being a writer is you never know when you're working. You can get up at 7am, sit at your desk for six hours and produce nothing, then achieve more between the cereal and bread aisles in the supermarket than you have all day. I find that deeply frustrating - I'm very keen on structure. The unreliability of my brain means it's hard to predict the future; when I'll have finished a book, for instance.
Breakfast veers between toast and Alpen - one or the other, not both. I drink only orange juice, never tea or coffee, which would only increase my level of impatience. I drive my wife mad because I have a list in my head of all the things we need to do. She generally gets up from the table, saying, 'I can't take this.'
To be a writer is to feel you're never doing enough work. Today I wrote 10 lines, threw them away, then dragged them out again. It's a kind of torture. I often wonder: 'Why I am I doing this?' particularly when I see friends setting up multinational businesses or changing the world. There are times when a book can seem like the most important thing, and others when it couldn't seem more irrelevant.