I’m on a three-day course on writing short stories in London.

This seemed a good idea last January, when I signed up for it, but now that I’ve left it too late to book an hotel under two hundred quid a night, it feels a bit daunting.

I’m going to have to get up at about 5.30 every morning to avoid paying the full train fare – the woman at the ticket counter glazes over when I tell her you could go to North Africa and back for less than she’s asking – and I’m going to have to take the tube every day. I hate the tube.

To me, the only good thing about the tube is it spawned the game Mornington Crescent. Oh, and the map. The tube map is superb. I can’t follow it but it’s elegant and colourful.

But from there on, the tube is all downhill. Literally. I stand at the top of a vast ancient looking escalator and hold on to the rail, looking straight ahead. Shaking. Like a lot of people who fear heights I always have an unaccountable urge to throw myself off them, just to put an end to the sweating palms and racing heart that come with acrophobia.

After a while, as we get lower, I become calm enough to distract myself by glancing at the posters to the side of my head.

They’re public information signs about the life of a tube escalator – how often they are maintained or replaced, some of the things that can go wrong on them – and trigger little palpitations in my chest.

But even once I’ve got down to underground level, the ordeal isn’t over. I can’t grasp whether it’s better to take the Circle or the Hammersmith and City, whether the Piccadilly Line stops at King’s Cross – and when I get out at Russell Square one of the lifts is out of action and the alternative is to share one with about 50 strangers carrying cups of hot slopping coffee or walk the 175 steps up to street level. I risk the scalding coffee.

I get out my pocket map of London and try to work my way to Bloomsbury, asking several tourists their opinion on whether I should go left or right at the next junction, and stepping out onto the road looking left when I should be looking right, so the chances of getting to the course without going via A&E first are looking slimmer by the minute.

At long last, I arrive at the lovely square where the course is being held, and am warned to take the left lift – it sounds as if the other one ends up in Narnia or somewhere – and then take the first left and through two doors. But the loos are on another floor. God, who’d have thought a writing class could be this tricky.

The 15 of us on the course smile nervously at each other and unpack our laptops and notebooks and comfort blankets. Then one of the blokes who’s going to give us a masterclass comes in.

He’s a well known novelist and screenwriter who is known for his frank and sometimes controversial depiction of modern life, and for the waves he has caused among his friends and family for mirroring their real lives.

So I’d be mad to name him.

But this is what he does. He walks into the room, looks at the way the tables are laid out all together, says I don’t like this set up, and pulls hard at one of the tables to move it out of the way so we can all sit round in a circle. The leg of the table collapses down a hole housing power sockets, and two delegates’ laptops fly off and hit the carpet, followed by a large glass water jug which shatters on the floor.

We all stand looking at him as if this is the most natural thing in the world. After all, he’s a writer. Maybe that’s what writers do. He is reassuringly unfazed.

We sit in the circle, and spend the rest of the morning creating characters and directing each other to the loo.

At lunchtime, a woman comes in.

“Is this short stories?” she asks. The course leader nods.

“Sorry,” she says. “I’ve just spent the morning in crime writing by mistake.”