'My day is frenzied, frantic, lunatic and s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d. I am not a lark and refuse to get up at dawn. My mornings start slowly and only after my first cuppa (preferably Darjeeling). I have no beauty regime or state secret to defy age, other than cleanliness. I've never been to the gym. I don't jog (although in my college days I was sporty). I have a 15-minute stretch routine that I've been doing since my school days and that's all.
I have a fortunate life with help - drivers, cooks and so on. My staff have been with me for years so they know just how hot I like my morning tea. I don't cook but I am a great cook - even if I say so myself. I don't follow recipes but go by instinct, flavours and aromas. I haven't made anything for years and my life would be at a standstill if we didn't have the helpers. I have 20 professional balls up in the air at any given moment. Whenever I am asked how I manage to do it all - the secret of my success - I always say: 'Behind every successful man is a woman and behind every successful woman, there's another woman.' In this case, it's my helper.
I read about eight newspapers in an obsessive-compulsive way, soak up everything, every morning, religiously. Two of the youngest kids are still in the house (the other four are adults and managing their lives and careers in Dubai, Malaysia and around India) but they're old enough to take care of themselves. My youngest is finishing school and preparing for university. I don't kiss them goodbye every morning because I don't subscribe to cliches. For the love of having my children around safe and sound, I don't drop them off at school - because I've no aptitude for driving and have crashed too many expensive cars. My children go in school buses, like others.
There's a large, antique circular dining table in the middle of the house where I sit and work like a demon. It's a huge mess of papers, magazines, articles I've cut out, ideas penned, notepads, stationery. You can't find the table under all the papers and [my family] threaten to bin it all. My mess and I bond. I know exactly where everything is and it frustrates my family no end. Fortunately, they all leave the house in the morning and I can sit uninterrupted.
I hardly break for lunch, it's my peak productive zone.
I get a lot of work done in a non-stop, focused way from about 10.30am to 2.30pm. I don't believe in writer's block. It's a lazy excuse and people just have to get up and get on with it.