When you picture someone writing, what do you picture?

A piece of paper and a pen, or a computer?

I used to picture the pen. I used to write with the pen. I used to write first, type later. Couldn’t do it any other way. These days, though, it’s straight into a blank word document, or I lose concentration and look out the window at the car being towed away opposite the cafe I go to. (At exactly 4pm every weekday, two parking ticket inspectors and a tow truck arrive at what was - at 3:59 - a car park but is now a clearway zone opposite the cafe. Parking ticket first; tow truck second; confused, disbelieving, furious motorist third. It’s a depressing regularity and the kind of thing one is likely to get an arts grant for filming in fast forward through a grainy camera with no sound and subtitles).

Sadly, my vision of a writer has clouded somewhat since I’ve attempted to be one. I don’t write things down, I don’t use a typewriter. I use a laptop, but not in the way I’d like to. I’m not like the writers in those pictures in American magazines that advertise the latest laptop: thoughtful, faintly amused writers in spectacles who wear white socks, resting on the laps of their clearly wealthy but inspiringly mixed-race families, while the fire burns away in the corner and the laptop is synched to the Blackberry which is synched to the office, where they have a job that requires them to write from home wearing white socks but also apparently keeps them in the life to which (just look at their kids) they have clearly become accustomed.

I never quite live up to the best parts of the corny picture people have of things. I live up to the worst: procrastinating on the internet, being antisocial, not having enough money to give anything the attention it deserves, and, you know, never going outside.

One day though, gadget. One day.

Well, at least the socks.