But if you feel like putting things off. . .

Procrastination is the name of the game for MAEVE HIGGINS, who will do anything to avoid writing

BIG DAY FOR Buster Higgins today, I’ll tell you that for nothing. Started out pretty standard – I woke up to the sound of some loud shouting – my own, of course. I was yelling something like, “I’m sorry Flo, it’s just not clear which whistle you mean.”

I can never remember my dreams but my screams on awakening often involve me pleading with rappers to be more explicit in their party-ready club-anthems. I lay in bed, spacing out and staring at my ceiling poster of Ronan Collins for a while. Then I planned my day. I had two things to do, and all day to do them. Number one: figure out a way to use the celeriac that’s been hulking around the vegetable basket all week. Number two: write about procrastination. Here’s how it all played out. (I’ll stick to the highlights. In the in-between times I sort of sat on my bed and fretted about not doing my work.)

8am: I leap up to face the morning. I pull my velour tracksuit on over my pyjamas, examine the celeriac and prepare to make some decisions.

11am: A thought strikes me. There’s a chance I procrastinate because I’m fundamentally a lazy, wicked woman. I realise I probably only think that because I was raised Catholic, so dismiss it.

2.30pm: I do some movement work. I’m trying to figure out the most flattering way to stand when talking to dreamy guys at parties. By dreamy guys, I mean guys with symmetrical features, not introspective guys. Lord hear us. (Anyone who agrees with me on that should now murmur Lord graciously hear us.) After a couple of hours of different angles and positions, I settled on the classic pose that is “I dropped something, I’ll take ages to pick it up, and while I do, I’ll maintain eye contact and chit-chat over my shoulder.” I test it on my sister and she agrees that it’s an extremely alluring stance.

6pm: I consider gratin.

9pm: I take my stitches out. I had a lobotomy last week. Just joking, I didn’t. That’s scheduled in for next week, and thanks for asking, yes – it is just out of curiosity. What happened last week was I cut myself on a can of condensed milk. I was making a lemon cream pie for my goddamned brother because he was running a race. I split my thumb right open, but it didn’t hurt. I needed stitches, but it still didn’t hurt. Everyone felt so sorry for me. At first I told them not to worry, but then I kind of got into it and started wincing and saying “it looked just like meat”. Between you and me, I enjoyed the attention. My doctor was male.

9.30pm: I plump for remoulade. It’s a classic for a reason.

9.35pm: I can’t shake the feeling that performing a medical procedure on myself to avoid writing is a new low. To pep up, I try and remember how I wrote my book. I know I had a bad case of procrastination then, the worst ever. It went on for eight months, until one day I googled “procrastination”. The word itself filled up my brain and came out my fingertips and went looking for itself in cyberspace, dragging me along with it. I idled along the information super highway, feeling the familiar combination of bored and panicky, until I read an article about a Hollywood therapist called Barry Michels. His theory is that procrastination is common in writers because they don’t have an authority figure to answer to, but they need to defy someone, so they choose the biggest Daddy of them all – Father Time.

He calls procrastination “a spurious form of immortality”, the ego’s way of saying, “Chillax buddy, you got all the time in the world.” Writing is like admitting we don’t have infinite time and that we are, in fact, going to die. No two ways about it. We’ll die. Even though we’re so great and we like being alive so much. Isn’t that lousy? Anyway, Michels’ advice is to sit at your computer each day for a fixed amount of time, surrender yourself to the inexorable passage of time, and write.

So I did that.

10.45pm: I have to be in bed by 11pm. That’s when the body heals itself and I, for one, have quite a large wound on my thumb. From myself, and Ronan, I must say a very goodnight to you all.

We have a good time . . . don’t we? by Maeve Higgins, €17.35, Hachette Ireland