I'm thinking up stories for 0110. This is how it goes with me when I try to be creative. Think hard. Nothing happens. Get cross. Stomp off to do something else. Idea arrives.

 

The trick, I think, is to fool myself that I'm stomping off angrily several times a day. Then I'll end up with lots of very creative ideas. Unfortunately I'm finding myself very hard to fool.

 

What I am getting, though, is scared. I'm getting that awful crawling feeling that something is watching me. Worse still, it's not happening in the dead of night. It's happening in the middle of the day.

 

I remember feeling like this when I was a kid. There was a book about ghosts in the school library, a quiet little room on a seldom-used corridor. I used to dare myself to go in there and look at one page in particular: the classic photo of the Brown Lady of Raynham. That picture gave me the fear like nothing on Earth.

 

And it's not only the sense of being watched. Things - normally reliable things - are misbehaving. The volume on the telly has gone, the wireless keeps dropping out, and my mobile...well, I got a garbled message yesterday, just a lot of noise like someone was phoning me from a car (or perhaps falling from a plane). The message ended with a burst of sped-up alien noise and then just cut off to silence. Yeah, that gave me the fear too.

- Laurence Timms 4th November 2009