It is just about possible to live in Newcastle and do a day’s work in the British Library. Squeeze aboard the 7.04 to King’s Cross and you can be in Rare Books, humming on weapons-grade caffeine, not long after 10am. Catch the late train home and you’ll be tucked up in bed before 11pm.

Ideally, one would stay a few days, catch up with friends, maybe crash a party – but who has the time? In theory, the answer to that question should be ‘me’. A generous period of research leave means that I am often zipping up and down the East Coast Main Line to spend the day lurking in Rare Books, inspecting watermarks and typefaces, scraping together the last few materials for a book that is due with the publisher any day, quadruple-checking collational formulae for a new scholarly edition of Pope’s early poems (volumes one and two of a potentially child-crushing twenty-three).

There are, I know, colleagues who look on all this restless activity with a degree of bemusement. Surely the entire point of research leave is that one needn’t go anywhere at all. Why leave the house when one might just as easily tap away on the laptop from the comfort of one’s bed? There is, to be sure, a long and distinguished tradition of writing in bed. My man Pope would regularly translate two dozen lines of Homer before rousing himself in the morning, scribbling the verses on the backs of letters or whatever scraps he had to hand (the resulting archival mishmash is now in the BL, of course). But it isn’t a habit that I have ever been able to cultivate. Even before I had small children to feed, clothe and drag to school, I needed to get up and out of the house early.

For years I had assumed this to be the hallmark of a virtuous, industrious character. Recently, I have come to realise that it is more probably a symptom of vanity. Perhaps the reason I like to get out of the house is because I like getting dressed in the morning: