Grace Dent's diary

I've been in convalescence. After a full August spent promoting my book, How To Leave Twitter, quacking on endlessly about tweet etiquette, twanking and the twitterati, my voice finally died. Gone. Nothing. Just a low Satanic grunt when I opened my mouth. After 15 years in London, finally I had to bloody well shut up.

The voice had been croaking for days, right through a slot on BBC Breakfast when Kate Silverton and Charlie Stayt harangued me for ten minutes about how anyone could possibly be addicted to social networking, in the manner of exasperated and ultimately disappointed schoolteachers, which drove me quite hysterical. I love how cross the mention of Twitter makes some people. I like telling them that the world will get even more reliant on the new social network Google+, just to see them go all Hulky smash, smash. By the time I appeared on 6 Music with Stuart Maconie, I sounded like I'd slept in a skip after consuming 40 Capstan Full Strength. I ended the day with dinner at one of my favourite places, Great Queen Street, with the ubiquitous Caitlin Moran, who could gossip the leg off a wooden pig.

But all further engagements were cancelled forthwith and I was ordered to rest. I've always been terrifically sniffy about people who don't work, claiming that even if I won the EuroMillions I would toil away regardless as 'work nourishes me and makes me who I am, yadder yadder'. This turned out to be utter hogwash. I am bloody marvellous at not working and have rarely been happier than this time spent in bed in East London with a snoring cat under one armpit, or taking long restorative walks along the Lea Valley canal through the Olympic site.

My previously uncherished, desolate East London is becoming increasingly festooned with earnest-looking Olympic walking tours. Hordes of tourists in breathable acrylic stare goggle-eyed at cement mixers and drink flat whites in the various hipster-owned cafés in the Hackney Wick environs. Moneyed hipsters are awesome at opening concept cafés and planning Book Slam evenings and art installations to sit beside the bespoke cupcakes, but are generally bloody awful at customer service, so I'm finding the spectacle of watching Americans demanding six coffees of varying filter strengths and expecting to get them before their coach leaves in three hours more exciting than any Olympic opening ceremony. A small gift shop selling keyrings and novelty gonks has opened beside the tiny previously anonymous caffeine-giving bolthole where I wrote my last Diary of a Snob book, which has recently been bought by Nickelodeon. It's the end of an era, but Hackney Marshes has never looked better kept so I can't complain.

Another upnote of my schedule annulment is that my friend, the writer Sophie Heawood, is fantastically pregnant and similarly 'unfit for hard labour'. Sophie is frighteningly, spherically pregnant. If it turns out she is having a small foal, it will make more sense. She changed her online avatar to Barbabapapa and no one noticed. We have spent the past week impatiently waiting for her to pop, at one point decamping to Shoreditch House to eat pizza and strawberry cheesecake and run through the finer details of blowing up the birthing pool, and by default completely ruined the quiet ruminative paperback-reading afternoon of David Schwimmer two couches away. British men look in terror at Sophie's bump; the Italian waiters greet her warmly and bring her extra cushions.

Back to work with a judging session for the Roald Dahl Funny Prize, a whole day trapped in a small room with Danny Wallace, Horrid Henry creator Francesca Simon and former Children's Laureate, the legendary Michael Rosen, who is simply hewn of funny bones and equally funny skin. We've read hundreds of books for the prize - I have eaten, drunk and slept monsters, talking animals, bogeys and lost stuffed toys. The highlight of the day was convincing Michael to read us a story in his best Jackanory manner. Danny and I sat enraptured, eating chocolate biscuits, back to being five-year-olds, belly-laughing at all the voices. A wonderful, silly experience that I won't forget.

I'm typing this in the back of a moving cab on my way to Dublin to talk more about Twitter. Being honest, my head has already sailed on to writing my new novel, so my flight bag is full of scribbled notes - mostly about London over the past 15 years, as this will feature heavily - and structures of how I think the book will run. I can't wait to start writing. I've been casing out cottages in Aldeburgh in Suffolk so I can get some sea air, make sense of the mess and go back down the book-writing rabbit hole again. I love London too much to work here sometimes; there are just too many glorious distractions. ES