Some days in life are awesome – things flow smoothly and you are on your game. Other days it quickly becomes apparent that you should have stayed in bed.

I’m having a stay-in-bed day today. My mother calls them “non-days”.

What is so bad about today? Well, I think a mouse has died in the wall by my bed, I have a relentless case of the hiccups, my brain has the mental capacity of a jar of peanut butter, and I actually have no idea what day of the week it is.

I can’t go back to bed, because of the smell of rotting mouse carcass. I can’t do my job because someone will discover how incredibly dumb I can be. I’ve confirmed that drinking water out of the wrong side of a glass does not fix hiccups, but instead makes you look like you lay on your back and wet yourself. As for what day it is, I worked out it was Wednesday, but then realised I was looking at last year’s calendar – it was at this point that I gave up.

Ironically, all these events converge to create the perfect mental state for writing. When your brain is busy smearing itself on a piece of toast with jam, it gets out of the way and creativity is free to flow unimpeded by stupid thoughts that involve guilt (I should be doing my “real” work), embarrassment (are you laughing at what I’ve written, or at me?), criticism (can’t you write something SERIOUS for once?) and a big helping of shouldn’t you be doing something that contributes to the world, like cleaning the toilet?

My dear reader, if you ever thought that writing was easy, you were right. But being in the state of mind that makes writing easy is so close to madness that I can almost touch it with my sticky PB&J fingers.