MOST people would agree that life in lockdown has had its challenges.

But for celebrated Barrhead crime writer Chris Brookmyre, being ordered to stay at home has been a relatively easy transition.

The prolific author was already spending most of his time indoors long before coronavirus reared its ugly head.

“I’m someone who works from home and doesn’t get out much, to be honest,” Chris told the Barrhead News.

“It would be more difficult if I wasn’t able to get out for a walk, as that’s very important for how I work.”

Chris finished his as-yet-untitled next novel last month, ahead of a 2021 release, so he had an ideal distraction for the initial weeks of lockdown.

His wife, Dr Marisa Haetzman, has also been busy.

She collaborates with Chris on books under the pseudonym Ambrose Parry and was working on a new novel set in the 19th century, providing her with a welcome escape from the constant feed of Covid-19 news.

Chris said: “I’m fortunate that my wife and I have been working on books together for a few years, so we haven’t had to get used to the reality of being stuck in the house together all day.

“That’s something else we were actually quite well prepared for.”

Chris does, however, admit that he is not good at being patient as the lockdown drags on for another week.

He said: “For a long time, we’ve all got this notion in our heads about how busy we ought to be and we tend to be very harsh on ourselves – certainly I do.

Barrhead News:

“I’ve been very prolific in recent years in terms of my output, to the extent that I find it really difficult to do something that doesn’t have a tangible productivity to it that I can point to.

“Maybe being given a hold of our own time will help us all create a new perspective on that but I’m constantly auditing what I do with my own time and trying to make sure that I’m using it constructively – and I think that’s probably not healthy.

“I’m not very good at lounging around.”

Chris had been looking forward to meeting ‘Tartan Noir’ fans at this year’s Bloody Scotland crime writing festival, which had been due to take place in Stirling in September, only for organisers to scrap the event as the coronavirus outbreak continues to affect our lives.

The pandemic also meant Chris had to adjust his latest novel, where the final third of the action was originally set in Italy in the spring of 2020.

Aware that Italy has had its own strict lockdown to contend with, he moved it back to the autumn of 2019.

Chris doesn’t expect there to be an appetite for lockdown fiction but he does want to see the pandemic bringing about a change in how we all interact with each other.

“Hopefully what you’ll see differently is people’s attitudes to other people,” he said. “One of the more positive elements has been that we’ve all made sacrifices in different ways, largely in an attempt to protect each other.

“And it’s one of the things that’s got some a bit spooked because, suddenly, the conversation has shifted. People are suddenly talking about universal basic income or about the value of the workforce and people as individuals, rather than just GDP (gross domestic product).

“Certainly even amongst conservative newspapers, the way in which they’ve had to frame things has shifted radically.

“If you had predicted just before Christmas that they would be having to lionize the contributions of immigrants a matter of weeks after Brexit was finally resolved, then I think you’d have been astonished.”

Chris sees the lockdown as an unprecedented opportunity to ask what kind of “normal” we want to go back to.

He said: “Do we want to go back to this economic and social model that always has us straining at the very capacity of everything because anything seems wasteful?

“It’s a chance for us to think about how we want everything to work in the future.

“Certainly the talk about people over a certain age, as if they’re a completely different subset of humanity, has been fairly galling to me.

“I just finished writing a book about someone who’s in her 70s and rediscovering the value of herself after a long time as well.

“The thing people forget is that people who are old don’t feel like they’re old people.”

Chris has also urged residents in his home town not to put too much pressure on themselves to get things done while the lockdown continues.

“Have patience,” he said. “It seems weird when there’s this abundance of time but it’s strange that people maybe think they ought to be getting more done.

“Anything creative always takes longer than you anticipate.”

With that in mind, Chris believes that, for anyone who is keen to explore their creative side, now is the perfect time to give it a go.

He added: “I think if you’ve written something or drawn something, at the end of the day you can say ‘Well, I didn’t just wile away the hours doom-scrawling on Twitter or Facebook.’

“Just have a go at it and don’t worry too much about how it looks in the early stages. With writing something – or any creative act – the act itself should be its own reward. It doesn’t have to be good, you don’t have to impress anyone else with it.

“And it’s good for the soul.”