Lifestyle magazine, Vice, recently complained that the Edinburgh café where JK Rowling famously wrote her Harry Potter stories has become an ugly tourist attraction where people dressed as wizards congregate in awe and worship.
As someone who has written 20 funny children’s short-stories, read them to children in schools and libraries to some acclaim and is currently seeking a publisher, I have absolutely no idea how she could manage to write anything in a bustling café with the noise of scraping chairs and rattling cutlery.
If I were to sit in my local café writing all day, I’m pretty sure the owner would say: “Listen, mate, one can of diet coke and a tuna sandwich every day isn’t gonna pay my bills. Oh, and can you stop putting your post-it notes of ideas on my obligatory café wall picture of Audrey Hepburn? The glue is ruining it.”
There is a myth – admittedly, generated by me – that I often sit in Wetherspoons pubs to help my creativity. This is nonsense.
The only thing I’ve ever created by visiting pubs, is a trail of lettuce from the subsequent kebab shop to my front door, like some modern-day Tim Burton version of Hansel and Gretel.
Personally, I write with no distraction in my front room whilst secretly hoping that I don’t become as famous a children’s author as JK Rowling (that’s going surprisingly to plan) because I’d hate fans to aimlessly wander around my flat or take pictures of me whilst I’m trying to watch Bargain Hunt in my Batman pyjamas.
Luckily, if they find my flat as uninteresting as I do, they can always nip across the road to the local Aldi so as their sight-seeing journey hasn’t been entirely wasted.
Admittedly, I wouldn’t mind a blue plaque on my outside wall, preferably, just under the gutter to hide the damp patch and, if they could temporarily rename the local pub after me, like they have JK Rowling, that’d be Bloominus Fantasticus!
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Russ Writes 
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