Sorry to hear you're feeling battered, Acme. There's nothing like a sprawl in public to enforce an unwelcome level of humility.

I, too, have a history of measuring my length on uneven pavement, and several of my limbs have the scars to prove it. Recently, the Facebook memory retriever fished up a selfie I posted the day after landing flat on my face, having tripped on a cobblestone at one of the Canadian memorials in Flanders. It was an unpleasant reminder of two weeks of vacation with a huge bruise on my chin, and how close I came to experiencing the Belgian health-care system with a fractured jaw.

Today I return to work on my book project after two weeks of procrastination divided between waiting for the author's feedback on the first two chapters, and panting through a Perth County Particular heatwave. The author -- a genuine, silver-plated narcissistic jerk, like many highly productive writers -- came back with four changes on 250 pages of close editing, which is a massive relief, as the whole reason I'm on this project is his wholesale rejection of his last editor's work.

But first I had to break out the vacuum cleaner for some procrasti-cleaning in the bedroom, where the Afghan carpet was disappearing under layers of cat hair and dust, and remove all traces of breakfast from the kitchen. If I hold true to my normal pattern, the book will get done between spasms of house-cleaning.

When I was an undergraduate, many long years ago, I would cook and bake on essay-writing days, pounding the typewriter for a couple of hours and then getting up to knead or chop something. The cooking task ensured that I would not leave the house until it was out of the oven, which was usually about when the essay was at least fully drafted, if not finished.