Gabriel Weston

My name’s Gabriel Weston and I’m first and foremost a doctor, but I’ve also just written a book, so I’ve recently become a writer as well.

We live in a house in the centre of London and we don’t really have any spare rooms where I live, so there’s definitely nowhere for me to sit and work at home and at the hospital, of course, I don’t have a study either so what I’ve found is that sitting in the car is a wonderfully mobile and completely reliable place where I know that I could always go and I’ll never be disturbed and I can have all the things that I need around me.

I suppose the process of detaching myself enough to be able to start writing really just requires me to leave the family behind, the children, those are the impediment to me being able to think anything useful at all. Once I leave the house and once I get into the car and put the windows up and establish my own little world in here, then I can start writing wherever I am.

I’ve got my notebooks, which I’m partly ashamed to say are those Moleskine notebooks which everyone says are rather silly notebooks for writers to write in, but I do like them. I usually have a pen or a pencil, it doesn’t matter what, and then once I’ve written something that’s come from my head and feels good, at a much later stage, I suppose when I’ve got about five or six thousand words, I would type what I’d written in my notebook onto a computer and I find really that the benefit of that is that when I have something in written print form, I can see what’s good and what’s bad.

I’ve also got a Thermos flask of tea, which I nearly always have when I come to sit in the car, and I’ve got a range of different CDs and I usually have classical and non-classical music, depending on how I’m feeling, and that’s pretty much it actually, that’s pretty much all I need.

When I’m in the car, there really is nothing that I can imagine other than a traffic warden moving me on that would get in the way of me being able to use the space very practically.