Procrastinators — we are not alone!

Okay, let it be known that I am a chronic procrastinator — I will never do today what I can feasibly put off until tomorrow.

The above image is genuinely the point at which I left my writing desk yesterday. Had someone knocked the door? I hear you ask. Had the house caught fire? Were armed response officers suddenly gathering in the garden of the house across the road?

It was, I'm sad to say, none of these things. The genuine reason was I suddenly remembered I hadn't yet done that day's Wordle! (Which I completed with a cup of coffee and a KitKat — 4 fingers, I'm not an idiot).

However, good people of Procrastinatorshire, the good news is we are not alone.

In an effort to stave off his procrastination, Victor Hugo would get his servant to strip him naked and not bring him his clothes until he had written something, whereas Herman Melville would get his wife to actually chain him to his desk so he couldn't wander.

St Augustine — a famous sex-addict despite his saintliness — once offered a prayer which went, 'Grant me chastity and continence — but not yet.' Surely this should be the procrastinator's motto.

Good old Margaret Attwood — her of 14 novels in 61 years — admits to, 'spending the morning procrastinating and worrying until 3pm every day, and only then plunging into a manuscript in a frenzy of anxiety.'

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a devout procrastinator. Publishers were constantly reporting imminent pieces from him that failed to appear. Even his famous poem Kubla Khan was never actually finished. He did, of course, have a sort of excuse in as much as he was beset with the choice between smoking opium or finishing one of his works. Opium often won out.

Douglas Adams once said, 'I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make when they go by.' He had been working on his final novel The Salmon of Doubt for a mere ten years and still hadn't completed even a first draft before he died in 2001.

Time magazine once described the then US President, Bill Clinton, as a chronic procrastinator who would spend weeks on early drafts of important speeches. Even vice-president Al Gore agreed that Clinton was 'punctually challenged.'

The supreme genius, Leonard Da Vinci, had a reputation as a day dreamer. He took sixteen years to produce the Mona Lisa and only finished The Last Supper after his patron, The Duke of Milan, threatened to cut off funds.

Even Shakespeare decided to inflict Hamlet with the affliction of procrastination. Hamlet is told in the opening scene to go and avenge his father's death. He then spends four and a half hours dillydallying about before stabbing another character to death instead. Okay, so he does eventually slay Claudius — his father's murderer — in the final scene, but only after his beloved Ophelia has committed suicide and his mother and several other characters have died first. Such are the perils of chronic hesitancy.

Finally, I can let you know that today I have added another four words to my unfinished sentence. That's all I have to do now is work out what order they go in. If you do, however, fancy reading something I have finished, just visit the store and see if anything ... hang on, I've just remembered ...