In her book about Joni Mitchell, Travelling, Ann Powers asks James Taylor what made his former lover such an exceptional writer:

“I do have a theory about her growing up in Saskatchewan and having a lot of open and by our standards empty time, and enough quiet to have a rich internal life…I remember growing up in North Carolina and I think it’s very connected to the way Joni must have grown up as a kid – there was a lot of time, a fair amount of boredom and sort of this internal imaginative life…That must have been the case with Bob Dylan in Hibbing, Minnesota, or Neil Young in North Ontario, or any number of people who were somehow allowed enough time to form their own thought patterns.”

Powers continues: “The child left to her own devices can begin to imagine getting somewhere, and that is the value, for the adult she becomes, of keeping her in mind.”

This rings true to me. My own childhood included a good deal of ‘open’ time and a hefty pinch of boredom. My brother is 11 years older than I, and when he was a teenager the last thing he wanted to do was hang around with his infant brother. What’s more, my Mother had five sisters and two brothers, all living some distance away, and most Sundays we drove to visit one or more of them. These were the days before children were encouraged to express themselves – indeed, we were taught to be seen but not heard. Luckily, my Father indulged me with an endless supply of order books from his tailoring business so I could sit and draw to my heart’s content while the adults drank tea and ate cake.

In the corners of those dark-furnished rooms I chalked up many of my 10,000 hours of drawing practice*. In the evenings, too, between homework and bedtime, there were more hours to be filled before television stepped in to steal our spare time. Pretty soon, I became proficient at drawing in a sort of comic book style (my influences were American Mad and Archie comics and British Commando war stories) while the subject matter sprung from my own imagination. I never copied anything other than a general stylistic language. Furthermore, it was very much ‘art for art’s sake’ so far as I was concerned: once the order books were filled neither I nor my parents had any wish to keep them or re-read them and they were thrown away as soon as my Father brought home a fresh one. Doing it was the thing, and the only thing that mattered.

Of course, you don’t have to be an only child. James Taylor fails to mention that he had at least two brothers and a sister; the three Bronte sisters were prolific in their short lives before the damp in Howarth parsonage carried them off; and the Bach boys must have taken in it turns to experiment on the harpsichord while Dad finished off a Passion in another room. It is the opportunity for solitary contemplation that matters and if you are an only child – in fact or in effect, as I was – those opportunities are more readily available.

It feels like a privilege in retrospect, that gift of time, that abundance of opportunity. Much is made of gratitude, quite rightly, in our mindful times, and if it sounds perverse to be grateful for boredom sixty years ago, I’m sure Joni Mitchell would agree with me.

* This refers to Malcolm Gladwell’s since debunked theory that 10,000 hours of ‘deliberate practice’ are required to reach the highest level of proficiency in anything, based on the Beatles’ numerous daily sets during their Hamburg residencies before they hit the big time and Bill Gates’ noodling around on early computers as a teenager. Michelle Monet has calculated that this adds up to 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 44 weeks a year for over 5 years, so we can be happy that this theory no longer holds true – not even my Mother had that many siblings to make such a feat possible.