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When I hear other people talking about procrastination, I find myself getting proprietorial.

Surely their fleeting pauses are as nothing to mine.

Procrastination is the main way I express anxiety and depression,

if I can use these medicalised, dignifying terms.

It's franker to say that I put things off because much of the time I'm frightened and sad,

too frightened and sad for procrastination to be enough of an outlet. I also have an

array of psychosomatic symptoms, rashes, headaches and stomach disorders, not that the line

between procrastination and illness is necessarily sharp, if it's there at all.

I can remember putting off projects at primary school, chronically eligible handwriting as much as anything, I think,

and a reluctance to put things down on paper dogged me through school and university.

Learning to type didn't stop it pursuing me into a career in newspapers,

an industry helpfully rife with deadlines and consequences, which meant that I was always

forced to produce something in the end. Still, the procrastination persisted, and as I eased into

middle age, it got worse. Every task took longer than it should have and felt less finished.

Other things got pushed back. I failed to make phone calls,

send letters and emails, do household chores, repair things, turn up for things, fulfill promises.

The career drifted away around 2009. Against a background of falling circulations, vanishing revenues and global financial

crisis, I can't make out how far my difficulties with deadlines were a factor. A lot of newspaper

careers were drifting away back then, but I remember a lot of uncomfortable conversations with editors.

Job gone, I sat around trying to write, managing bits and pieces but earning very little,

and then my marriage drifted away too, leaving me in Alan Partridge's phrase clinically fed up

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