I was bought a beautiful mechanical pencil for Christmas a couple of years ago. It’s a Faber-Castell eMotion, and the chunky barrel is made of pear wood and the rest is shiny chrome. It does take some getting used to but once your fingers are used to the size of the barrel you’ll be writing beautifully. The lead (they use polymer these days, but you know what I mean) is silky smooth on any paper, and the wood finish is very tactile and aesthetically pleasing. So, after six months or so of living with my beautiful pencil I got the matching fountain pen. I chose a broad nib because I write more fluidly with a generous nib. I struggle with fine nibs, they cramp my style. The number of times I’ve decided to spend a train journey writing (mostly) nonsense just for the pure pleasure of using the pen is testament to its beauty. I get out my writing notebook (an optimistic 500 pages) and write about what I can see out of the window, or notes for a short story, or, more likely, a character assassination of the couple on the next table — might come in useful one day, eh?

I use cartridges rather than bottled ink and have a few different colours which I swap according to my mood. I like watching the ink change colour slowly over the space of a couple of pages from deep crimson to bold turquoise through various shades of purple. I buy Diamine ink cartridges because Diamine is, supposedly, the best British ink, and they certainly have an immense range of colours. I use cartridges because, let’s face it, it’s easier than bottled ink. I have a set of scented ink which I’ll try out when I’m not so worried about running out of ink while I’m travelling. I’m not carrying a bottle of ink around in my handbag.

Here’s my pen: Faber-Castell eMotion in pearwood and you can get Diamine ink on the same site, or direct from the manufacturer here: diamineinks.co.uk

For little treats for the stationery nerd (you can claim you need them for your work if that makes you feel better) try katynjune.co.uk. I have their weekly scheduler, pretty post-its, and I buy small notebooks in bulk from them as I use them for client work (I use a different coloured notebook for each client… It makes sense.) I’m eyeing this up at the moment: The Daily Times. It seems like a way to combine the various reminders, shopping and to-do list applications I have on my phone.

Close up on an anologue clock. The hands start to turn backwards and get faster and faster until they slow to a halt.

For years now YummyHubby and I have been talking about saving to buy a house. We definitely want a house, not a flat. We’re fed up of neighbours. In those badly carved up Victorian semis that litter the suburbs of London living on any floor bar the top one means you’re woken up at 2am on a Friday morning by drunken neighbour on his way to bed. At midnight on a Tuesday by next door having noisy sex. At 7am on a Sunday by the five year old who lives upstairs as they run hell for leather along the hallway to wake up mummy and daddy. Lord. Then, if you live on the top floor it’s unlikely you’ll have any outdoor space to call your own, not even windowsills wide enough for a few pansies to brighten the late winter months.

OK, so we’ve established that we want to buy a house. Where?

We moved to Surbiton five years ago. Surbiton, Queen of the Suburbs. It’s popular with city workers as the train into Waterloo takes only 17 minutes. Blimey. A quick scoot along the Waterloo & City and you’re in your office within half an hour of leaving the house. Not at all bad. It’s also handy for Wimbledon and the posh shopping areas of west London thanks to the District Line (that’s the green one, pairs up with the Circle line along its southern hemisphere). And then just a dawdle in the other direction and you’re in the very posh, overpriced family houses and village greens of deepest Surrey.

Then there’s the river walk. If you have the patience to walk a mile to Kingston Bridge you can then come back along the towpath on the far bank and you will eventually arrive at Hampton Court Palace. It’s glorious in summer. A picnic in Bushy Park, a boat trip along the Thames for a wander round the overpriced shops of Teddington (overpriced is a common theme in this part of the world) and you’ve managed a proper day out without straying from your doorstep.

So it’s popular. It has lots of reasons to be popular. A small terraced house, 2 bedrooms, possibly 3 if the extension out the back that’s eaten half the garden takes up two storeys, costs £350,000 or more. And that’s only if you’re really living in neighbouring Tolworth, which doesn’t have the cachet of Surbiton and you have a 20 minute walk to the train station of a morning. Take a bus? Don’t make me laugh. With all the 4x4s fetching and carrying offspring to school there’s no space for a bus. It’ll take at least as long. You might as well walk.

There are flats, one and two bedroomed flats, more central, perhaps even right near the river, that would come in around the £300,000 mark. But for a house in an area we liked we’d need another £200,000 or more. Lord. The house opposite our previous flat, in the scruffiest of all the ‘river roads’ went for over a million. It’s a 3.5 storey thing with garden front and back, the basement converted into a self-contained flat and the last half-storey ready to transform into a huge master bedroom with ensuite wet room, no doubt. But still. A scruffy Victorian semi going for over a million.

So that was our option. Buy a small terraced or semi-detached on the very outer edge of Surbiton, with a patch of garden and our own front door. And stump up three hundred and a bit grand for the privilege. We talked about saving. With deposits fluttering around the 10% mark we were looking at saving £35,000 to cover fees etc as well. After three years of saving we had a grand total of zero pounds in the savings account.

Then, as luck/fate/scientifically provable cause and effect would have it, we were forced to save, and save hard. I’ve been susceptible to migraines since I was a teenager. I’ve had bouts of migraines, where I’d have exceptionally painful – want to chop your head off painful – migraines two or three times a week for a period of three to six weeks. It’s pretty horrendous. But this time they didn’t stop after three weeks. Or six weeks. They kept on going and going and going. After three months I went to the doctor. I was referred to a neurologist, a migraine specialist. His soothing, comforting analysis was that they – neurologists, the guys who study the brain – don’t understand why we get migraines. Well, besides it being a result of a chemical imbalance. Mine are definitely stress-related. But why my body chooses to beg for my attention by inflicting such pain on me is anyone’s guess. There are a bunch of things you can do to mitigate them but even the most effective drugs will offer no more than a 60% improvement. I can’t take the most effective drugs because I’ve got asthma and taking beta blockers could kill me. So I have to use some less effective, icky side-effect drugs instead. But it’s ok really, he smiled, because they’ll stop when I hit the menopause. Oh. That’s OK then.

So, I stumbled along, taking medication that turned me into a zombie, for a couple of months longer, until the times between the migraines were decreasing to the point where I couldn’t function as a normal human being. I’d be unwell for 24 to 48, sometimes 72, hours with a migraine attack. The following day I’d go to work, feeling grotty and hungover from the side effects of the medication I took to ease the pain, and I could barely get through the day. I cancelled every social engagement I had. I missed some amazing events. Dirty laundry and household chores started to pile up. Letters and emails from friends went unanswered and books stayed resolutely on my to-read pile. Weekly grocery shopping turned into a daily trip to the supermarket to find something ready made for dinner. Eventually I had to stop work, I couldn’t cope any longer.

So I was off work, being paid ‘statutory sick pay’ which is a pitiful amount of money. After two months of this instead of having no savings we suddenly didn’t have the money to pay the bills. We sat down together, YummyHubby doing most of the hard work because my brain wasn’t capable of it, and worked out a budget. We’d stop eating ‘cheating’ food, as we called it, no more ready meals from Waitrose or Marks & Spencer. We’d cook real food. We’d have to let the cleaner go (this was easy, the cleaner left before we had to give her notice) and YummyHubby offered to clean, he’d iron his work shirts and I’d do the sheets. We’d cancel this and that, I’d stop binge-buying clothes and go back to cheaper brands for toiletries and make up. And on it went.

After just two months we’d pulled ourselves out of the overdraft and had a healthy slush fund again. I went back to work part time and the slush fund became real savings. Suddenly it was as if a light came on. YummyHubby sat in front of our spreadsheet, excitedly altering formulas and making models and with the light of a revelation on his face turned to me and said, you don’t have to work if you don’t feel up to it.

Now I realise that in this time of irresponsible government, where the already poor and not so well off are suffering immensely thanks to the austerity measures the rich sods in the Cabinet are inflicting on the country, it may seem unfair to actively want to not work. But bear with me.

I don’t not want to work. But what I do want is to live a life which doesn’t give me excruciating, debilitating migraines and make my life a drug-infused hell. I want to live by the sea and be a full-time writer. I want to write novels. I want to get up in the morning and take my dogs for a run along the beach, then go home to my own house, not one I’m renting from an unscrupulous, money-hungry landlord, make a pot of coffee and sit at my desk by a window overlooking the garden. Then I’ll sit at that desk and tap away at a keyboard, turning images in my head into words on a page.

But you don’t go from working in digital strategy to being a paid-enough-to-give-up-the-day-job author. So we found a way to get me started on the right track. We adapted our spreadsheets, talked about our options for a few weeks, a gloss of restraint on every decision, until we had a plan. A definite possibility.

And it came to this. We found a town where it would be cheaper to live but where YummyHubby could still get to work. We found a 3-bed house to rent, for half the cost of our trendy suburban one-bed with garden. I negotiated a part-time, freelance contract with my existing employer and that was that. We packed, moved, unpacked and here we are.

My day-to-day has no commute which reduces stress. I work from home so I can potter about before and after and in between with baskets of laundry, supermarket deliveries, and looking after a pan of beans cooking for an hour, or watching over dinner in the oven. Small things, but they help smoothe out my usual fretful state. I don’t need to get dressed up and wear make up. I haven’t worn perfume for weeks. There are no client-facing meetings so I don’t need to get my hair done quite so often. These are all things which mean significant savings in the long term as well as making my regular day easier. Small things on the whole, yes. But it adds up.

I now work four mornings a week to earn a steady, guaranteed, monthly income. I have each afternoon and one whole day per week to spend on looking after myself and writing. And because we’ve moved out of Superpriceytown we can afford for me to do that and still save up for our deposit.

Ah, but what of the deposit? Looking back from a two year distance, we could see quite clearly why we weren’t saving for our thirty grand deposit. Saving that much out of our joint salary seemed so unrealistic that deep down we didn’t think it was worth trying. Even more importantly, we realised that we didn’t want to live in middle class suburbia for ever. No siree. We want to live near the sea, surrounded by big skies and fresh air.

So we’ll save up a more pragmatic twenty-something thousand and buy a converted coaching house with wonky floorboards and an overrun garden in a small town in Norfolk. We’ll carry on with our self-inflicted austerity measures and build up our savings account. We have a rental contract of two years. And we need to have our deposit together at the end of these two years. So we have two years of eating home made food, being crafty and making new out of old, no extravagant expenses, no new clothes, no waste and no indulgences. Two years of thrift.

Part of our deal is that I complete my first novel this year and sell it sometime next year. If it works out, then I can give up my day job and become a full-time writer. If it doesn’t then things will carry on much as they are. I’ll work part-time from home and two years of thrift will become, perhaps, a lifetime of thrift. But if that lifetime involves living by the sea and taking the dogs on long walks to the beach in the morning, and pottering in the garden in the afternoon, then that’s fine. Thrift it is.

And then on Friday my day stretches ahead of me like arctic tundra. Without signposts I’d get lost. I still do, to be honest, but much less than I used to. They say it takes 21 days to make a habit, but my 21 days are never consecutive. It still takes discipline and organisation every time. Neither is my strong suit.

I’m sure you’ve all been there. You stay in bed just a while longer. Leisurely shower. Linger over coffee and toast. Lose an hour in the time sink that is the internet (in my case, particularly Twitter). Oh look, there’s nothing in the fridge for lunch, I’ll just pop out and buy some stuff. OH MY GOD IT’S 3pm AND I’VE DONE NOTHING YET!

So, to counteract that, I have added in a few safety nets. These are a way to track the passage of time as an anti-procrastination measure, a reminder for things with a deadline, and a to-do list for that day’s tasks.

Oh heavens! Is that the time?
One thing I’ve used for years, not as a time management tool but for pleasure, is a Tibetan bowl chime which strikes on the hour, every hour. It’s a beautiful sound, not a nag, but it does remind you that an hour has elapsed and it’s easy to make a mental note if you think you’re procrastinating, or not getting as much done as you’d like. If I’m at home I use my alarm clock’s hourly chime function, which is on by default in our house. (Best alarm clock ever) Or I use a dashboard app on my Mac which recreates the hourly chime of the old OS9.

get your own
If you use a Mac then get the ProdMe dashboard app for Mac. It’s no longer supported, but you can still download it here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/dashboard/status/prodme.html

There’s an iPhone app called Chime,  you’ll find it in the App Store. It’s a very simple hourly chime and a beautifully made app, but I don’t like the sounds they’ve included. I find the zen clock and dashboard app are both harmonious and relaxing, and therefore preferable.

Don’t forget!
I have tried out a number of reminder apps on my iPhone since last year when my migraines came back, after many years without them. I was advised to stretch my neck, change my focus and get up and move. The ones I’ve settled on have different functions, but I do like Alarmed. It’s easy to set up, has an automatic snooze that you can set once an hour to remind you to have a glass of water, or a one off event plus a nag feature which keeps going off until you to make that phone call or write that email. It’s flexible so will serve most people’s purposes.

get your own
Alarmed is free, with pay-for add-ons. Again, it’s in the App Store, or search for reminders for your platform.

Making a list, checking it twice.
I use TeuxDeux for my non-office days. It’s beautifully simple and attractive. You assign your tasks to a particular day (plus a handy someday section) and cross them off when you’re ready. But the beauty of this app is its day focus; you only see the current day’s tasks (not true of the web version) and here’s the real cunning, if you don’t cross a task off your list it moves to the following day. So if you set yourself say 5 things to do on Monday and you only accomplish 3, you’ll see on Tuesday that the remaining 2 have rolled over, in addition to the other tasks you’d set up for Tuesday. Can you imagine what it will look like by the time you get to Friday? This app has allowed me to learn two things. One is that I overestimate how much I can get done in a day, or over a weekend. The second is that it’s a gentle enough nudge for me to accomplish some of those tasks without making me feel overwhelmed — stress and deadlines send me to an unhappy place and ultimately to procrastination.

get your own
You can read all about it here: teuxdeux.com. I use the iPhone app, but you can use it in your browser on your Windows phone/laptop and I’ve heard they’re making an app for Android and maybe Blackberry, so you’re all sorted. It costs $2.99 which I realise some will think is pricey for an app. I have no problem paying for someone else’s expertise and this is a beautifully executed app. If you use a task list manager that is bloated, over-featured and confusing, then try it. It’s the price of a big cup of coffee. You’ve spent more on a shirt you’ve never worn, amirite?

If you haven’t yet found something that works for you, then do keep trying. You’ll crack it eventually.

Back to the book. THE book. The one I started off with. From my usual spot on the sofa I can’t read the title, and to be honest there are so many that I’ve forgotten what awaits me. But there it goes again, catching my eye. There’s some foil trim on the spine. Just a flash at the top and two shapes, stars perhaps. In this overcast, dim light of an early autumn afternoon it shines out. It’s probably a deep turquoise blue when not reflecting the light, my brain tells me, but out of the corner of your eye, when you’re not really looking, it’s the phosporescent green of the hands on an old alarm clock. I’m sure it’s that, the memory of the slim crescent moon  that used to shine out at me during the long, dark nights of my childhood that means today I will choose to read this book next.

And yet, reading the book will stop the glow. The book will sit on a bedside table, or perch on the arm of the sofa, or be tucked into my handbag — all places where the light won’t catch it in quite the same way and my childhood alarm clock will be left to settle back into the murky depths of memory.

Perhaps I’ll read the autobiography next instead.