In these troubled times we all get the ‘bothers’ but I have a surefire cure: write them down

‘Modernists such as Virginia Woolf discovered that there are times when the sensation of the moment or feeling of a memory is either too fluid or too fragmentary to be captured properly by the sentence.’ Photograph: GL Archive/Alamy

Treat yourself. Instead of reading the rest of this article, first go and write down something that’s bothering you …

… I’m now assuming you’ve done just that, and have come back to this, the next sentence. My theory is that writing is great for dealing with bothers. We often hear of the talking cure – I’m up for that. I’ve often talked about the doing cure. It’s saved me many times. I think with huge fondness of the gentle way in which colleagues at the BBC quietly nudged me into doable tasks after my son Eddie died. Many people in my situation at that time are not so lucky. Long stretches of nothingness can be tough, straight after a big loss.