Warfare – ideal for all timewasters

"All things can tempt me from this craft of verse," said WB Yeats. "There is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall," judged Cyril Connolly. "Distracted from distraction by distraction," wrote TS Eliot. Boy, oh boy, did they have a handle on the freelance life.

On the one hand, I save an hour and a half a day every day by having a nine-foot commute (I've measured it) between my bed and my desk. On the other, I waste at least twice that amount of time every day on, on, you know. STUFF. I'll put a wash on. A cafetière of coffee will get me in the mood to work. Oops. No milk. Best pop out.

Yet Yeats, Eliot and Connolly all had the blessed good fortune to die before the distractions got serious. They did not have Trisha or television poker. They did not have "wilfing" on the internet. And, above all, they did not have video games.

An official at America's Federal Communications Commission has just announced that addiction to the online role-playing game World of Warcraft is "one of the top reasons for college dropouts in the US".

The enemy is not the pram in the hall. The enemy is Warcraft - and the main mercy in my life is that, just before I was made redundant, my laptop ran out of memory and stopped being able to run the game.

"We should get a new computer when we move," Alice said in passing the other day. "Yours is getting a bit slow, and it would be nice to load up my photos."

"NO!" said my brain.

But out of my mouth came a voice I last heard when I saw The Lord of the Rings on DVD.

"Yes, what a good idea," it said. "My PRECIOUSSSS "

If this space is blank next week, you'll know why.

* Another distraction, of course, is eating. I popped round to Franco Manca, the unrivalled sourdough pizzeria in Brixton Market, to meet my friend Tibor for lunch. Tibor, a novelist, is not optimistic about the recession. He reckons the game is up for literary fiction. And, for that matter, everything else. "It's the end of money," he said, chewing morosely. "For everyone, except possibly footballers."

Another writer friend has decided Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a documentary portrait of the near future: "Seriously, we'll all be hoarding OAPs in our basements for food."