Daily Routines is endlessly fascinating for those who work at home sometimes and can't shake off a guilty feeling that sitting in your pyjamas at noon eating a Lion Bar is not the way to Get Things Done. Nonsense! Winston Churchill got things done and his routine is the best of the lot: 7.30am substantial breakfast and working in bed, followed at 11am by rising, bathing and a weak whisky and soda in the study; 1pm three-course lunch with friends, champagne, brandy and cigars. Then a little light work or possibly backgammon, and "at 5pm, after another weak whisky and soda, he went to bed for an hour and a half."
We brush aside the up-before-dawn and 10,000 words-a-day types, and embrace those who mastered a more civilised life, such as Nabokov - Scrabble, butterfly hunts and long naps - or Turman Capote: "I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I've got to be puffing and sipping."
I mean, whose work would you rather read, Colette - swimming, sex and regular blood transfusions from an attractive young donor - or film critic Roger Ebert - rise at 7, oatmeal, treadmill, cold shower etc. And Joyce Carol Oates's comments - "To me, wasting time isn't in my nature. I find it difficult to understand why people would deliberately waste their time" - make me determined never to read a word she's written. Most importantly, try never to sit next to the highly self-disciplined J.M. Coetzee: "A colleague who has worked with him for more than a decade claims to have seen him laugh just once."
Some had more idiosyncratic routines. Auden's method, perhaps not recommended, was to take lots of speed, which he considered a "labor-saving device" in the "mental kitchen". Maybe Gerturde Stein is the one to emulate: "Miss Stein likes to look at rocks and cows in the intervals of her writing... Miss Stein spends much of her time quarrelling with friends."
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