I've just come off the phone to Stuart, my permanently cultured friend in France, who was buzzing with excitement about pigs, straw-built houses and life in general. I, au contraire, was feeling less perky than a pig; it has been a bad day in Brighton and not just because of the weather. I spent a good two hours staring at my screen this afternoon feeling everything I had written was puerile. It was a case of the bad attack of the jitters that Stuart picked up on and did his best to cajole, flatter and generally encourage me. He said that my problem is and always has been my low level of confidence and that I write well. How kind!

However, the episode reminded me of something I heard on the radio recently. I think it was Barry Cryer, though I wouldn't swear to it, who was reminiscing about his early days as a scriptwriter and who defined the collective noun for a group of writers is an insecurity of writers. How accurate is that? And how it cheered me up to recall it when I most needed it.