I get to my desk (in a very small room at the top of the house) at about 10, and fiddle about with the height of the desk and the chair until I’m comfortable. I have a desk that I can raise or lower according to the state of my aching back. Sometimes I stand at it, and sometimes I have it high up to write at, and sometimes a bit lower to type.

The desk is covered by an ancient kilim, because it looks nice, but that’s not a good surface to write on, so I have one of those green safety cutting mats to support the paper I use, which is A4 narrow lined, with two holes. I love the shape of the A paper sizes. It’s the only one of Andrea Palladio’s recommended architectural shapes (the ratios of room length to width, and so on) that contains an irrational number, in this case the ratio of one to the square root of two. Very handy for illustrating Pythagoras’s famous theorem, in fact.

Nearby is a basket full of coloured pencils, including some of the best of all, the Berol Karisma range, now unfortunately discontinued. For each book I write, the paper is authorised for writing on by means of a coloured stripe along the top edge. I fan the sheets out and colour a stack at a time. The current book is a warm blend of Karisma Pumpkin Orange and Faber Castell Venetian Red. I sometimes think I should make it clear which key I’m writing a particular passage in – D minor, at the moment – but that would be silly, unlike colouring the pages, which makes perfect sense.

In front of me there’s a little aneroid barometer, a present from my son Tom, which also tells me the temperature and the humidity. Near that is a piece of equipment given to me by the scientists at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, which came out of an instrument that detects dark matter, or tries to. It’s a cylinder of glass in a copper casing, about the size of a small snowball but much heavier. I use it as a paperweight for my current manuscript, so it can go on detecting dark matter, or Dust, when I’m not around. I also keep some binoculars handy so I can watch any interesting birds through the window. The village heron lumbers past occasionally, and right now there’s a red kite circling over the church tower.

A red kite in flight. Photograph: Drew Buckley/Rex/Shutterstock

One handy piece of equipment, which I recommend to any writer of fiction, is a set of Myriorama cards. I consult them frequently. I think the idea comes from the early 19th century. There are 24 of them, each one showing a slice of a landscape, sometimes with figures, sometimes without. You can put any of them next to any other, and the pictures join up perfectly, so you can make a vast number of different scenes. “When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun,” said Raymond Chandler. Or pick a Myriorama card, or several, and see what comes to mind.

The newest occupant of my desktop is a beautiful 15th-century bronze Buddha from Myanmar, which my wife gave me for my birthday. The eyes have the characteristic asymmetry described by William Empson in The Face of the Buddha, written 70 years ago but only recently published.

In two or three untidy piles an arm’s length away are the books I’m most reliant on at the moment: books about Central Asia, principally, and maps. Maps! They cover the walls, they stand in ranks behind my laptop, they absorb my attention for hours. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan and Khyrgyzstan! Mountains and deserts and movable lakes! But also books of poetry: Rainer Maria Rilke, Wallace Stevens, Paul Valéry. And dictionaries, of course.

Coming a little closer to the centre of things is my stack of newly coloured paper, and my pen. I write in pen because it works. A fountain pen is no good for writing in the way I do, because I’d have to decide, each time I stopped, how long I was likely to stop for, in order to know whether or not to put the cap on. But I never know. So instead I use a ballpoint, a Montblanc to be precise, the most comfortably balanced pen I’ve ever found. I am available for sponsorship.

I see I haven’t said anything yet about the central activity itself. Instead I’ve been taking up time talking about all the bits and pieces I have around me, and I haven’t even mentioned the magnifying glass or the Post-it notes or the worry beads. Wasting time, perhaps. Fiddling about and getting nowhere. But what else did you think writers do all day? Write?

In brief

Words: I write three sides of A4 narrow spaced each day, which is about 1,000 words

Time wasted: No Twitter or email on my work computer, so I’m not distracted by that sort of thing

Hours: I start at about 10 and go on till about 1, and then if necessary work from 5 to 7ish in the evening to get up to my three pages. The rest of the time I just lounge around