A dormant plastic descant recorder

Barbara Trapido offers a particularly lovely instantiation of the Guardian writers' rooms feature. (No cats, though!) Here's a nice bit:

The way I work is to bed down in here two nights a week and rise at 3 or 4am. Then I write, cross-legged, in bed with an A4 pad on my knee until about nine. The mini-kettle and the Mr Illy tin of biscuits are because I can't leave the room, or I get that Xanadu moment and my fantasy life flies away. Writing novels is like dreaming. My real life returns with breakfast and the room goes back to playing dead. All I use it for after that is email.

I love Barbara Trapido's books, she's on my short list of particularly favorite novelists (the world of her novels is magical, but it's also got exactly the feel of what life is like, i.e. my life--it is a totally counterintuitive connection, and I actually fear that there is probably not a single reader in the world who will share my opinion on this because it is a strictly personal one, but Iain Banks' novels give me this feeling also--their protagonists [partly, I suppose, because they think more than most protagonists in novels?] have inner lives that seem recognizable to me in a way that the protagonists of, say, oh, what are good examples--it must be writers I like or the comparison loses its purpose!--novels by Jonathan Coe or Claire Messud do not...)