With me, every day is different. There are writing days when I get up at six and come down and just start writing. My brain is still bubbling, still in a weird dream state. That's when the best ideas come. I'm doing an MA at the Royal Holloway college at the moment, where you basically learn how to write and structure films and TV. I'm doing this screenplay for my MA, so I'll write from 6 till 9.
I might sneak into the loo, then get a cup of tea and an orange or something. But if you don't glue your arse to the chair you're not going to get the work done.
So, three hours writing, then I might have breakfast. Either scrambled eggs or low-fat yoghurt and berries with honey on top. I try to be healthy, though can I just clearly state that there have been full English, and there will continue to be, but just not every day. Dawn makes a brilliant full English. The secret is diligence and fantastic ingredients: fresh organic eggs, great bacon, proper sausages.
Then it's the gym for an hour, an hour and 20 sometimes. I do a mixture of cardio and weights, and then I go to work. I'm doing a lot of children's stuff at the moment. So it could be that a car comes to take me to a studio where I do four hours of voiceover. But there are other kinds of day. On a filming day I'll get up at 5, get ready, and the car's waiting and you go and do filming all day. On a telly day you rehearse four days a week and then do the show on the Friday or the Saturday.
We've got a house in Cornwall, but a lot of our work is in London, so we've got a flat there. Our daughter, Billie [18], lives with us in Cornwall, but she goes to boarding school. Whenever we spend time away and then come back we find, like, three tons of mail. You can't open the door because of all the bills, the fanmail, the Amazon.co.uk packages… Amazon's a great thing, isn't it?
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I buy music every day. But I've found myself going through these secondhand "you can bring your bike in here and we'll give you albums" kind of shops. You know, "Bring a chair, we'll give you Songs in the Key of Life." I miss that ka-thump of the albums banging against each other when you rifle through them. There's camaraderie in record shops - we're all geeks and slightly isolated people who just like buying records. When I'm on the road I'll go into record shops, and I'll try to find a comic shop because I collect comics.
Records, comics and books take a lot of my time. And then I spend a lot of time doing things like: "Did you lose the charger for the phone? Well, we'd better get a new one."
Or: "This thing doesn't work on the computer, you've got to go to the Apple shop." So there's a lot of admin-type stupidity. And if I'm in London there's usually two or three phone calls a day, trying to catch up with my daughter and my missus.
For lunch I'll have something like lamb and salad. I'm trying to be more conscious of what I take in because Othello's coming up. I have to get in shape, because nowhere in the script does it say: "He is pushed on in a trolley." Of course, in Cornwall the irresistible thing is the pasty. It's sort of a big handbag full of meat and potatoes. If you get involved with that, that's a million calories right there. You might as well just strap one to each hip. And when I go and see my family, Jamaican food's incredibly starchy and fatty. Which is why nearly everyone in my family is huge!
My favourite restaurant in London, in Soho, is called Mr Jerk, and I had rice and peas there once and it made me cry because it was like my mum's cooking. I don't know what happened to me. I had all these memories, this immense childhood rush. It's amazing that food can do that to you. I think the man said: "Come on, the restaurant isn't that bad… If you were at the Ivy you'd pay four times as much!"
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In the evening I'll usually have fish or something. Apart from the odd bit of EastEnders or Britain's Got Talent, we don't watch much telly, though Dawn watches it more. And I watch a hell of a lot of movies, because of the MA. I love comedy, though I find the things I want to write have a more serious side. But I think most comics would say that.
I'll walk the dog last thing before bed. She's a westie called Dolly. I take her out about 10.30. Sometimes we do it en famille, other times it's just me. And you have to do it in all weathers. But I quite like it.
I'm usually in bed by 11, and that's when I tend to do half an hour of reading. I'm a voracious reader.
I go to sleep reasonably well. In Cornwall I have the last throes of the seagulls to contend with - they lull me to sleep. I tend to dream a lot, in Technicolor. I never dream in the style of EastEnders; it's always a big palaver - three hours in the style of Charlie Kaufman last night. I'm lucky to be alive.
Lenny Henry plays Othello at Trafalgar Studios, London SW1, from September 11 to December 12