On October 13, 2020, David Lynch rose and did what he had typically been doing each morning when he awoke during a long-term Covid isolation in his house and work studio just off Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills. First, while filming himself for his YouTube channel, he swirled ten numbered balls in a large glass jar, his eyes averted, then picked one. “Today’s number is ten,” he declared.

I get to my desk (in a very small room at the top of the house) at about 10, and fiddle about with the height of the desk and the chair until I’m comfortable. I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at, and sometimes a bit lower to type.

I have two kids, so once we get them off to school, I tool around on email and Facebook longer than I should. Then I shut those things down and get to work.

As many of you know, I observe specific protocols to open the creative mind – I sit at a desk in my office and write, working exclusively between 9am and 5pm. Within ‘office hours’ I find my mind becomes genuinely free, and I feel a creativity that is qualitatively richer than anything I may experience outside of this time, in the disorder and distraction of the ordinary world. For me, what must appear to some as forced labour is where all the imaginative mischief, beauty, and love are free to happen. Freedom finds itself in captivity.

In 1948 when the brakes failed on our car. About to get on a plane to New York on 9/11. Choking on a fishbone.

At what age? It’s been a long path. I’ll stick with Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell. (“Someday I’d like to try a book like that,” I said to myself, “only with a female narrator. It would of course be quite different.”)

A canoe, mixed sun and cloud, no deadlines in sight.

Begrudging mean-spiritedness.

I don’t know. Probably Alice, maybe. But we were contemporaries, Alice Munro. I think it was probably most in poetry. I was of that age to get influenced. After a while, you don’t get influenced because your brain has turned to cement.

Long, lingering dementia, followed by death from choking on a fishbone.