Overachieving, snacks and caffeine

Instruction to AI: A woman with white pixie-cut hair, thick black glasses, wearing a high-necked black fleece is sitting at a desk with a keyboard, mouse and monitor. She is facing a window and can see hills and spruce trees. There is a bag of gummy sweets, some packets of biscuits next to her.

25. Thursday 29 January 2026

Thursdays seem to be my peak performance days. As with last Thursday, I totally overachieved today. I wrote/edited five chapters. It’s amazing how good it feels to have a productive writing day. I wouldn’t have had time or inclination to snack had I not tidied the snack drawer in a break. Big mistake. I wanted to empty a few packets and storage jars, so ate the contents. I then rediscovered Squashies and ate a load of them. I tried a corner of Digestive biscuit, which my friend Carla said is her favourite biscuit (I disagree wholeheartedly), and realised it was stale. I then chucked the remaining Digestives out for the birds. It’s probably really bad to feed biscuits to birds, but they ate them, though they disappeared so quickly that I suspect it was the crows who took them rather than the little birds.

                It really does seem to take me at least three days to get back into writing/editing when I take more than a day off. Or it might just be me assuming it’ll take that long to get back into it. This morning, it wasn’t looking good. I felt tired and brain foggy and I didn’t want to write while I felt like that. So I prepared my sourdough for its fridge stage and did a few other chores. Then, at 09:30 I realised I hadn’t had any coffee or tea. I was horrified to think that an absence of caffeine was affecting my liveliness levels. So I made breakfast (three halves of yesterday’s fresh sourdough, one with butter, two with butter and Marmite) and a mug of Assam tea. Followed closely by a black coffee. Was it the power of the mind or just the caffeine, or of course my excellent homemade sourdough? But after breakfast, tea and coffee, that was it, I was on a roll.

In other news, it was all about the snacks, the sourdough (I got sucked into Reels; I genuinely had no idea what a massive thing sourdough is or how many elements of the process there are tips for) and … gah, is that how limited my day was?! I fed the birds with seeds, peanuts, Digestive biscuits and some of the Yorkshire pudding batter oven-overspill that I saved for them from last night. As a total aside, my friend Rachael told me that there had been a fox who frequently visited the communal garden where she lives in London. It didn’t have the healthiest of coats. One of the residents started feeding the fox, which I know is a really bad thing to do, particularly in a residential area. Anyway, she also added something to its food (or drink) that's a treatment for an unhealthy (dog) coat. Some time later, the fox had a beautiful, sleek, furry coat! I’m not sure that Digestive biscuits will have the same effect as feather lustre though.