When is sympathy the wrong approach? When you are talking to a perfectionistic procrastinator with ongoing leg pain in winter. When it hurts to sit and stand, and its cold and wet outside, it's so comforting to curl up under a cosy blanket and escape into a well-told tale, whether a novel or a television series. And when your own words emerge in jerky clumps, as if your thoughts are crashing against successive barriers erected by electric flashes of pain - well it's too easy to say "I'll write better when I feel better", and open a new novel on my E-Reader.