Like most freelancers, I can’t get through the day without a brew. From the moment I get up, the kettle is on constantly.

Tea is a panacea for all known freelance experiences: writer’s block, reaching for the right word, prevarication, interviews that don’t go well, interviews that do, deadlines, research, end-of-year bookkeeping, talks with your accountant. Every event starts and ends with a cuppa.

I blame my parents. They put PG Tips in my Tommee Tippee cup when I was a toddler and now I’m too hooked to turn over a new tea-leaf.

Over the years, friends have fed this obsession with various devices supposedly designed to create the best brew or boxes of different tea from around the world containing exotic loose leaf tea or bags square and pyramid.

Now I’m in a daily quandary deciding how to feed my habit with the most productive kind of the delicious golden nectar – oh the joys of flexible working! It beats office brews hands down – no more horrid machines dispensing tepid tea-flavoured water for me.

Today I’ve decided the morning starts with a Teapig, even though they’re ridiculously expensive and in a daft silk pyramid.

Tomorrow it could be loose tea in my squidgy yellow submarine Christmas present or my old traditional metal diffuser (although it’s murder to prise out the used tea). Alternatively, I could copy Star Trek’s Jean-Luc Picard and opt for a soothing Earl Grey.

Anyway, must stop now, the kettle’s just boiled.