Jonathan Coe: ‘Where do I write? On the train, in the pub, Heathrow Terminal 5...'

The novelist describes his protean working practices – which might take place at 6am or 5pm, in his sister-in-law’s flat or on the top deck of a bus

In Flann O’Brien’s great surrealist novel The Third Policeman, the enigmatic Policeman MacCruiskeen takes the hero aside at one point and says: “Come over here, till I show you something to tell your friends about.” It turns out that this is one of his rare jokes, because “what he showed me was something that I could tell nobody about, there are no suitable words in the world to tell my meaning”. In fact, the policeman merely shows the hero some “things” that are glimpsed falling down a chute for a few seconds, but “these objects, not one of which resembled the other, were of no known dimensions”. They have no shape that can be described, no colour that can be identified, and after hours of “wild‑eyed, dry-throated” thought afterwards, the hero can only say that what made them astonishing was simply that “They lacked an essential property of all known objects.”

And here, in a nutshell, is the problem of describing my writing day. It seems to lack an essential property of all other working days. It lacks shape; it lacks structure; it is of indeterminate duration and its texture is infinitely variable. No one writing day bears any resemblance to another.

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