I love the wonderful feeling of finishing a job, the liberation of clicking Send. When it’s too late to nit-pick any more, and I can stop doing my head in looking for precisely the right word for ‘desarrollo’ when ‘development’ won’t do. It’s a moment of euphoria; it’s done, finished, gone – and I can’t touch it again.

I enjoy translating. I like trying to resolve the little challenges along the way: finding the precise word I’m looking for or rearranging sentences to make them less confusing. But when I’ve just finished 20,000 words on Iron Age Gaul and clicked that Send button I feel as if I’ve just finished my finals.

It’s like putting down a heavy load. A lightness comes over me – I’m free! I wander around the house contemplating possibilities. I could clean up this mess in the kitchen, I could go for a walk, I could finish those curtains I started making a couple of months ago. It’s the contemplating that I like, not actually doing any of them. All that potential…

But it’s getting late, nearly time for tea, so I’ll have a glass of wine. We call it tea, other people call it dinner or supper. It’s what we eat around nine in the evening. But whatever you call it, when you’ve just sent a job, it’s a wonderful feeling to sit back and relax with a glass of wine and good food. And since Dave thinks my cooking is crap, I don’t even have to cook it myself.

In the morning I clear my desk. I put all the books away, stick the pens back in their pot and remove all the clutter. I find there’s something oddly satisfying about seeing the final corrections as just so much scrap paper to be dumped. Now I’m ready to start on something else.