I’ve just had a new wooden floor laid (okay, I confess, it’s laminate) in the loft space where I write.

I’ve also just been given (with a friend’s cheeky nod and wink) a book called Care of Wooden Floors: A Novel.

How could I not read it?

Written by Will Wiles, the book is about an obsessive man who lends his pristine apartment to an old university friend.

The loan comes with the stern injunction not to damage the perfect wooden floors.

Yes, the inevitable happens.

And, yes, with red wine.

And, yes … several times.

What I’ll take from this book into my newly-floored loft is how the quest for perfection can so easily become a tyranny.

Unfortunately, I need to learn this!

Having despoiled the pedant’s apartment, the university friend says of his own less-than-perfect flat: “What had obsessed me … staring at the smudges on its window panes, was not the actual flat, it was another imaginary flat, the possible flat. It was the idea of perfection — that if I had a better place, I could be a better person.”

My 83-year-old friend D (who recently climbed the loft’s steep ladder bare footed and lithe as a gazelle) says the loft space feels Bohemian and she’s sure I’ll have beautiful thoughts to compose there.

I hope she’s right!

Bohemian and beautiful are far more generous words than pristine and perfect to guide a writing life.

I’ve laid out these words before me like a Turkish carpet on my new loft floor.

I trust they’ll provide a firm and rich foundation to work from.