Here goes…

1. Coffee. Coffee not only makes my life bearable, coffee makes my life possible. Without coffee I could not get up at 6am in the morning, travel for two hours, do a day’s work, go back to a hotel for dinner and polite conversation with colleagues I dislike, then do several more hours overtime. I run on coffee the same way a car runs on petrol. If I don’t get enough at regular intervals, I will simply cease functioning and go to sleep. The more stressed I am, the more coffee I need and the stronger it has to be. Recently I have taken to drinking it black because sometimes my insides randomly decide they don’t like milk, and I think it tastes significantly stronger like that which can only be good. I know that coffee is bad for me, and it actually doesn’t take many cups a day to make me feel quite ill (irregular heartbeat, faster breathing), but nevertheless coffee is *necessary* and I would never consider not drinking it on a day when I’m under pressure, I just try to offset it with copious amounts of water. I don’t, however, regard myself as having a caffeine addiction, for the simple reason that if I’m not working, I don’t get much urge to drink it, and it’s rare for me to surpass one or two cups a day for recreational purposes

2. Following closely behind coffee, I couldn’t live without my mobile phone. This, I confess, is an absolutely obsessive addiction, which I think stems from the fact that I’ve suffered so many computerless years where my phone was my only means of electronic interaction. I have never accidentally left my phone at home, but if I did I think I might cry. I have genuinely had nightmares which involve me packing the wrong charger when I’m working away for a week and condemned to pass days without checking my email. This is a completely irrational obsession, since I get very few interesting emails these days, but somehow I can’t quite shake it off

3. Brisk walks. One of the things I’ve noticed over the past few years is that the times when I’m most unhappy are often the times when I’m cooped up somewhere and unable to go for a decent walk. For me there are few things worse than a day in which I cannot go outside; at work this certainly depresses me, but an entire day cooped up in my own home would be equally bad. Even when I’ve been on holiday with Babel, spending more than an hour in the room when we could be outside gets me down, and I spent half the daylight hours of the IS going for walks. Don’t get me wrong, I despise exercise for exercise’s sake. But I dread the day when I become so old and frail that I can’t go out and walk to the shops every day. I think I shall go stark staring mad! Walking helps me let off steam and aids me in ordering my thoughts, it cheers me up and it gives me a sense of perspective. Life without brisk walks would be substantially less bearable.

4. Writing. I don’t write anything sensible these days, but I still can’t go very long without spilling words onto pages. Woe betide anyone who tries to correspond with me – you will never keep up, I will always out-write you and have the last word. Ever since I was five, writing has been my preferred method of passing time (as opposed to watching tv, playing games, even reading) and I still have some of my exercise books from that time with the (utterly incomprehensible and punctuationless) stories I used to write. These days life is a little more hi-tech and I can write blogs and what-not rather than endless paper diaries, but the most exciting present you could buy me in the whole world is a blank notebook. I aspire to nothing more in life than a constant stream of blank notebooks in which to scribble.

5. Pasta. If I tell you I eat pasta five days a week, hopefully you’ll get the picture. I would actually eat it seven days a week if I were left to my own devices. Pasta is the most amazing food substance known to mankind, and I have chosen it ahead of chocolate and pizza for this list because of it’s extreme versatility. There are so many wildly different meals you can base on pasta and why anyone would choose potatoes over it is a source of eternal mystery to me.

6. Duck. Actually duck should perhaps have come higher up the list. Unless I’m with Babel, I genuinely think I would struggle tremenduously to sleep without duck. Especially when I’m away from home – I spend a lot of time in hotels feeling nervous or on edge, but duck makes me feel safe

7. I’m struggling to think of something concrete for number 7, so I’m going to go with a sense of humour. I think the day you stop being able to stand back and laugh at yourself is the day you’re truly lost!