There’s a man coming to fix my TV, which tried to neck itself last week after inadvertently being left on for a whole episode of Threshold, and the repair company is only able to give me an appointment time accurate to the nearest geological epoch.

So I’m forced to spend a whole day stuck inside the house waiting for him to come, a job made much more difficult by the necessity to avoid the fact that it’s a normal work day and I should be inside the house anyway, actually working. Here’s how it goes:

Two months ago, as I was in Las Vegas shooting Osama bin Laden with a machine gun, a man connected to the publishing industry was reading the choicest extracts from my novel. Before him were two stacks of paper: one piled heavy and high and marked ‘NO’, the other much shorter, marked ‘YES’ and, I’d like to think, haloed with tinkly stars dancing to a heavenly coloratura.

Suddenly I’m at an imaginary party.

“Nice party,” I say to a passing poet, rather lamely. She nods politely. I look around, a bit lost.

“Listen,” I say, “do you know why I’m here?”

“I don’t even know why I’m here,” she says crankily. “Why am I a poet? You’re making me up, you tell me.”

There is a man looking in my study window from the back yard. I suddenly can’t remember where I keep the cricket bat. He’s swarthy, and he’s tapping on the glass and saying something which I can’t hear because I’m listening to some traditional Georgian choral music on my headphones and I’ve just turned up the volume as high as I can stand to get the full majestic effect.