2009 has got off to a cracking start with the news that 40-something writer Sadie Jones has scooped the Costa First Novel Award. Not only that, her book, The Outcast, is now being tipped to win the £30,000 Costa Book of the Year.

I was bowled over by the novel when I read it back in July and picked it as one of my favourite summer reads for the Daily Express. "If I only had room for one book in my holiday suitcase this summer I'd take The Outcast," I wrote. "Set in the stifling world of post-war Surrey, former screenwriter Sadie Jones's debut novel recounts the story of Lewis Aldridge. At the age of 10, Lewis witnesses the drowning of his adored mother. Unable to speak about it and broken-hearted with grief, he burns with a desperate, pent-up anger. After serving two years in prison for arson in his late teens he returns home to his father and stepmother in a bid to 'make things better' - with devastating results. This assured, elegant novel stayed in my head for days after I'd finished it. A breathtaking achievement."

So far I've bought five copes for family and friends and I'm sure I'll buy more in the coming weeks. Even better, I've just heard that Jones is adapting the novel for the big screen.

If you haven't read it yet, you're in for a treat....

Progress on my new novel is an uphill struggle some days. But I was inspired to double my daily word count when I read this new review of my last book for grown-ups, Taking Sides. Here it is:

A million apologies for not updating my blog more regularly over the last few months. I've been so busy blogging for Easy Living magazine - see http://www.easylivingmagazine.co.uk/Blog/?blogid=9 - that I have neglected this one. But just to say, I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a great New Year. Here's looking to 2009...

The news that children are having to be taught how to be happy made me unutterably depressed. Apparently 20 schools across the country are already giving happiness lessons – to help pupils banish pessimistic thoughts and cope with whatever life throws at them.

I know the weather’s rubbish, the economy is in a mess and the holidays are over – but surely things aren’t so dire that children need happiness lessons? At the risk of sounding like Pollyanna, the little girl who melted the heart of her embittered old aunt by finding a silver lining in every cloud, I’ve come up with a list of things that have lifted my heart in recent weeks:

The conundrum of whether women should carry on working or stay at home to look after their children has been hotly debated for years. And today the argument is raging again – following the publication of Cambridge University research that claims the “shine of the supermum” is wearing thin. More people, it declares, believe the family suffers if mothers work full-time.

It’s an infuriating generalisation. Most of my friends with children don’t have a choice about working or not working. They go out to work because they need to pay the mortgage and make ends meet. One has retrained as a teacher, another is a doctor and lots are journalists. Most of them find their jobs interesting and stimulating but even if they didn’t, they’d still be doing them.

My theory is that when it comes to work women do the absolute opposite of their own mothers. My grandmother worked all hours in a wallpaper and paint shop in Lancashire. It was hard graft for not much money and my mother was frequently a latchkey kid, arriving home from school to an empty house. When my mum launched her hugely successful career she asked her aunt to come and live with us – so there would always be someone at home to look after her children.

My mum adored her career and became the most influential columnist of her generation but later on she often said she wished she’d been at home more when we were growing up. So when I had children I decided to try and have the best of both worlds by leaving my newspaper job and working from home as a freelance. It meant I could collect L and N from school, go to plays, concerts and parents’ evenings and take time off during the summer holidays.

All good – except that now 16-year-old L is thinking about her future she’s horrified by the idea of being self-employed. She hates the precariousness of freelancing – you’re either twiddling your thumbs or snowed under with work – and yearns to work in a busy office environment, with the buzz of working alongside other people, proper lunch breaks and a monthly salary cheque.

The debate will rage on, I know. But judging by L’s example, I reckon the next generation won’t be swayed by academic research. They’ll make their own minds up...

Headteacher Anthony Seldon has hit the headlines again after declaring that schools should introduce army-style PT training in a bid to improve children’s discipline.

I was thrilled to see majestic, moody Pendle Hill listed in Christopher Somerville’s new book about the most breathtaking wild places in Britain and Ireland.

Maybe I’m biased but Pendle, whether it’s shrouded in mist or bathed in sunshine (a rare occurrence) is simply stunning. It towers over the north Lancashire countryside and on a clear day (again, rare) you can see as far afield as the Lake District.

I spent two years living in an isolated farmhouse on the side of the 1,800-ft hill and still count Pendle as one of my favourite places. Our house had no central heating, the nearest neighbour was half a mile away and we regularly got snowed in. When N was a baby we ran out of food after three days of snowstorms and had to be rescued by a kind-hearted friend who parked her car at the bottom of our pot-holed mile long drive. I trudged down the track to freedom carrying N in a backpack and pulling three-year-old L on a sledge.

Even on the hottest summer days a howling gale whistled round the gables of the farmhouse. The sheep in the next field were so desperate to get their teeth into our very un-lush lawn that they used to shin up the five-foot garden wall, trot along the top and jump down to munch on our grass.

Just thinking about Pendle is making me nostalgic. It’s high time I went back...

My mother, who died in October 2004, never ever complained when people made nasty comments about her. As a newspaper columnist, she reckoned that if she criticised other people then she had to accept it when they made disparaging remarks about her.

But twice recently, journalists have denounced her for comments she made about the late Mo Mowlam (writing in The Guardian, Peter Wilby described her behaviour as “inexcusable”).

The trouble is that reports like this simply don’t tell the whole story. It’s true that my mother criticised Mo’s appearance, only to discover afterwards that the politician was being treated for cancer and was on a course of steroids. But they don’t mention that fact that my mum was devastated when she learned the truth about Mo’s illness. She apologised immediately and Mo generously accepted her apology.

In fact, after my mother’s death, Mo paid a wonderful tribute to her. “An excellent journalist who was sometimes misunderstood,” wrote Mo. “She’d done me over a couple of times but was a friend by the end. She was a wonderful writer whom I very much respected.”

Writer Jane Owen has been a friend of mine for years - ever since the days when I sat next to her at the Sunday newspaper where we both worked. She, incidentally, was the paper's highly-regarded royal correspondent, while I was the greenest reporter on the block.

Jane's now a very successful gardening writer who regularly works with the likes of Diarmuid Gavin. I often bump into her around Oxford, where she lives, and she always talks good sense. She's just written a piece for The Times expressing her horror at the Chelsea Flower Show being turned into a glorified extension of the Kings Road, selling Manolo Blahnik shoes, Jo Malone candles and designer outfits. She appeared on the Today programme at dawn to talk about her views and I could sense Radio Four listeners up and down the country crunching on their cornflakes and agreeing with every word she said.

PS: Loads of congratulations to the lovely Adam Frost, who's just won a coveted Gold Medal at Chelsea for his stunning urban garden. Adam and his hard-working team worked wonders on our small, scruffy garden last summer - and if they can do that they're pretty top-notch in my book...

Getting my husband and children all assembled in the same place at the same time is a bit like spinning plates. I’ve no sooner got one of them nailed down than another says “oh by the way, I won’t be there. I’ll be mountain-boarding/meeting my friends at Starbucks/doing loop-the-loop that day.”

And so it proved when I wrote a newspaper piece about my mad decision to buy a tumbledown French farmhouse.

“We’d like a picture of you all together,” would seem the simplest of requests for most families. Not in our case. A is away most weeks, my teenage son N was off surfing in Cornwall and L’s social life is always frenetic. The only person who was around all the time, as usual, was me.

In the end the picture desk got so desperate that they agreed to come and photograph us a couple of weeks later and 200 miles away from home - in the Lake District.

As we shivered in sub-zero temperatures and tried to look as though we were all basking in the Provencal sun, N hissed at me.

“This is weird,” he said.

“Why?” I whispered.

“I can’t remember the four of us ever having our photograph taken together before.”

Hacks are seething at Coleen McLoughlin daring to give her occupation as “journalist” when her wedding banns were posted at Crewe register office. “How many doorsteps has she been on?” asked seasoned newspaper commentator Roy Greenslade, who also pointed out that Coleen's main journalistic claim to fame is a column in Closer magazine called Welcome to My World.

I’m currently helping a friend update her book on the art of interviewing and we’ve both come to the conclusion that it's an awful lot harder than it looks. One of my favourite interviewing stories comes from John Sergeant, ITN’s former political editor. He once revealed that his pet hate was clever-clogs newsreaders who ask reporters on the spot completely unanswerable questions.

“What’s in the mind of Mikhail Gorbachev?” was one query that drove him bonkers.

Like the consummate professional, Sergeant did his very best to answer the question. But wouldn’t it be satisfying if once in a while the TV reporter snapped back: “You stupid twit. How the bloody hell should I know?”

Looking back, I’m not totally sure why we left London in the first place. I think the main reason was that my husband felt hemmed in by the tower blocks, south London traffic and 24-hour noise and longed to see wide open spaces when he woke up. The tiny, litter-strewn park where we took baby L for walks at weekends depressed him and the final straw came when a car was set on fire in the scruffy mews behind our house. Within a few months we’d upped and left the city for the wilds of the Lancashire moors.

But now L and N are teenagers talking about what they’re going to do when they leave home I’m making plans too. I can’t believe I’m writing this but I’ve got a secret yearning for my old London life. The theatre, exhibitions at Tate Modern and catching up with my more sensible friends who stayed put in the capital. I dream of life in a minimalist top-floor flat – with L and N popping in whenever they can. Am I completely mad?

Quite a few friends have swapped careers in recent years – some to fit in with the ridiculously-long school holidays, others because they were bored to tears with their jobs and longed to try something else. One ditched work at a travel company to train as a primary school teacher, another swapped nursing to work in IT and a third left journalism to start an interiors business.

When L and N were little I nearly joined them. I tried my hand at teaching for a few months but soon realised I was utterly useless and scuttled straight back to journalism in double quick time. I’ve been working flat out as a journalist ever since, writing and editing for a string of different publications and can’t imagine how I ever countenanced doing anything else.

But with doom and gloom about readers deserting newspapers and turning to the internet instead, journalism is an increasingly precarious business to be in. I’ve just read a report saying regional newspaper company Archant plans to axe some of its sub-editors and replace them with non-journalists. In future a group of workers called “advertising designers” – who’ll be paid £7,500 less than the highly-trained subs – will design the newspaper pages. Meanwhile news reporters will have to write their own headlines – never traditionally part of their job.

Getting rid of the subs sounds a terrible idea. Subs in my experience are a wise and clever lot – who’ve saved reporters like me from many a catastrophic blunder over the years and newspapers would be all the poorer without them.

The only thing that I am envious of in Archant’s new regime though is the chance to write my own headlines. I now have to create punchy headlines for some of the publications I edit and it’s my favourite part of the job. It may look easy but summing up your story in a few succinct, sassy words is an awful lot harder than it looks... Long live the subs!

The response to TV psychologist Dr Tanya Byron’s report on child internet safety has been overwhelmingly positive. I’m not surprised. Her calls for a national strategy involving better self-regulation and education and improved classification of video games exude good sense.

When I interviewed her a couple of years back I was struck by her wisdom. She admitted that bringing up children and preparing them for life in the modern world is tough. She also told me that she lets her own two children watch TV, use the internet and eat sweets – but, and this is the crucial bit, in moderation and under strict supervision.

“You can’t do parenting by numbers,” she said. “Parenting is about finding what works for you and your child. Routine is important but you’ve got to be flexible too. I really worry about the amount of time parents have for kids. It’s so important to relax and spend time with them.”

A particular bugbear of mine is the way lots of parenting experts drone on about the wonders of putting stars and smiley stickers on charts to reward children’s good behaviour. When I told Tanya how L and N refused pointblank to go along with this idea when they were little she was honest enough to admit they aren't necessarily the answer.

“The big error in parenting is that we give too much attention to the behaviour we don’t want and not enough to the behaviour we do,” she said. “Sticker charts are very good for getting parents to focus on specific activities for specific periods of time. But to be honest I don’t think I’ve ever done sticker charts with my kids. They once did a grumpy Mummy, nice Mummy sticker chart for me though – only I stole the stickers and stuck all the smiley ones on.”

Phew - that made me feel an awful lot better...

A London teacher says parental discipline is so lacking these days that some children are "unteachable." She was left with cuts and bruises after a pupil assaulted her in class and now she's scared to confront misbehaviour in case she gets attacked again.

With newspapers reporting that some school corridors have become virtual no-go zones while others have brought in their police officers, CCTV and even airport-style scanners to make sure pupils aren't carrying knives, I reckon teachers should get far more appreciation for the tough job they do. When I tried teaching at an FE college one of the first things I learned was what to do if students were drunk, abusive or even pulled a knife in my lesson. And no, the answer wasn't "run for it."

I quickly found that teaching isn’t half as easy as it looks. You can’t just stand at the front and lecture (“chalk and talk,” as teachers call it) – or you’ll bore your students to tears. You have to devise interesting lessons, keep the students’ attention and ensure they actually learn something along the way. Looking back, I’m not sure I taught my lot much at all. One student fell asleep virtually every lesson, others attempted to chat and text when I wasn’t looking and as for handing their work on time – sorry, it rarely happened.

But then again, I never got attacked for my efforts. The trickiest thing that happened was a student who whizzed a skateboard up and down the classroom floor. Very tame – but pretty irritating all the same.

Some people turn their noses up at literary festivals but I love them. My favourite is the King’s Sutton Literary Festival, held every spring in a pretty Oxfordshire village. It’s organised by volunteers, takes place in the super-smart village hall and all the proceeds go to the church restoration fund.

This year’s festival was a triumph, with an eclectic mix of speakers, packed audiences, homemade cakes and a fantastic second-hand book sale. Admittedly 13-year-old N was a bit sceptical when I told him I’d booked us both tickets to hear a Daily Telegraph foreign correspondent talk about Africa and an octogenarian writer give his views on everything from practising at the Bar to his sneaking fondness for Cherie Blair – but he’s a kind boy and he agreed to keep me company.

N turned out to be enthralled by Tim Butcher, who spoke about his riveting new book, Blood River, and then by John Mortimer, who began by talking about his latest Rumpole yarn and then veered off to recount tales of Harold Wilson’s jollity, his memories of Laurence Olivier playing his dad in A Voyage Round My Father and the fact that QCs keep their silk stockings up by wearing suspender belts designed for outsized hospital matrons. There were one or two more risqué jokes along the way too – and yes, I know I’m probably fooling myself when I reckon N didn’t get the gist...

My lovely 16-year-old daughter L has always been way ahead of her time. She tipped her friends off about the Arctic Monkeys months before anyone else had heard of them and now she’s intensely fed up that the rest of the world has finally caught up with Lightspeed Champion.

She was a surprisingly tricky baby – refusing point-blank to ever have a nap during the day, insisting on being carried upright so she could always see what was going on around her and wide awake and ready to party most nights. Bleary-eyed and exhausted at keeping up with her, I eventually came to the conclusion that she simply found being a baby boring. The minute she started walking and talking she was as happy as Larry.

The same thing is happening now she’s in her mid-teens. She’s set up our computer network, designed my website, frequently acts as a maths consultant to her cousin’s homework queries and can cook supper for four without batting an eyelid. She’s fiercely independent in other words and longing for the day when she goes off to university. The only problem is that there are the dreaded GCSEs and A levels to get through first...

At 13 N’s had more than enough time to get used to the notion of school – but he’s still not that keen on the idea. He’d far rather be whizzing about on his mountain-board or splashing through puddles on his bike than learning about the Tudors and Stuarts and poring over algebra problems.

A report published today reveals that children in England start academic lessons earlier and sit more tests than their European counterparts – but still perform no better as a result.

A primary school teacher friend has been saying this for years. She reckons school is especially difficult for boys between four and six. They hate sitting still for long stretches, loathe colouring in worksheets and would far rather be in the playground. She always makes sure her lot get plenty of time outdoors. Even on rainy days she sticks on her coat at the small Lancashire primary where she teaches and everyone goes outside for 20 minutes to run off steam.

N would simply love it!

It’s a freezing cold January day – the sort of day when you want to light the wood-burning stove and lie on the sofa reading the papers and drinking endless cups of tea.

Except that’s not what happened at all. N and I were up at the crack of dawn to drive 40 miles to the other side of the M1, where I spent the day running up and down a muddy river bank and he spent the day rowing up and down the water with his teenage pals.

The event was the rowing club’s annual head of the river (why they have it in January, I don’t know!)

N, I’m proud to say, rowed his socks off. He’s now got aching limbs, blistered hands and a silver tankard for his efforts. For my part, I can say that all that running, yelling, hauling boats in and out of the water, handing over sustaining ham and tomato rolls, buying energy drinks etc was completely worthwhile.

Hooray for Jack Holsgrove, the unwavering 86-year-old who refuses to give into the property developers and sell the home he loves.

The pensioner bought his 1930s beachside house in sought-after Sandbanks more than 30 years ago for the princely sum of £60,000. Just along the coast from Bournemouth, it’s got stunning views across Poole Bay and to the Purbeck Hills beyond.

In recent years he’s been offered more than £10 million for it – but refuses pointblank to budge.

“Why should I ever want to sell and move somewhere else?” says Jack. “No amount of money could buy that view again.”

If I had a house at Sandbanks I wouldn’t move either. We lived there for six months when I was 11 and it was completely glorious. Our garden backed straight on to the beach and me and my sister spent hours building sandcastles on the shore, skimming stones and leaping into the waves. We could see the sea from our bedroom and watch dinghies tack back and forth as we did our homework.

Our house was an ordinary-looking white-washed bungalow called Flintshore – it hit the headlines last year when it went on the market for a cool £4 million – but sadly it was only a winter let while we looked for a house to buy.

When Easter came and the summer rental season burst forth,  our short, blissful sojourn at Flintshore was over.

The only event that’s enlivened the week so far has been the New Hampshire primary – the pollsters who got the result so spectacularly wrong, the snowy scenes that 13-year-old N yearns for, the enigmatic Hillary Clinton and the question of did she or didn’t she cry? I’m really bothered about her name too. Why, when she used to be called Hillary Rodham, did she ditch the name she was born with?

I’ve had loads of trouble with my own name over the years but it’s mine and, for better or worse, I’ve stuck with it. I’m mystified by why so many women take their husband’s names when they get married. Maybe it’s just me but it seems weird to think of waking up one morning and finding that you’ve turned into someone else.

I’ve always been rubbish at New Year’s resolutions – so rubbish that I’ve usually forgotten what they even are by Twelfth Night, let alone come close to keeping any of them.

But a Christmas letter from a friend has put me to complete shame. Approaching 50 this year, she’s decided to mark the event by lining up 50 inspiring projects. They have to be “specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timed” – and range from learning how to make marshmallows and parallel park to seeing the Bayeux Tapestry and visiting Argentina.

I've failed to come up with 50 projects to get cracking on but inspired by Miranda’s example, I’ve assembled ten. And at least my blog will help me remember what they actually are for a change. L and N are doubtful I’ll manage to keep even one of them but I’m determined to prove them wrong – so here goes.

1.    Give up alcohol for January – read more about my battle on www.easylivingmagazine.co.uk/blog

2.    Make at least two rooms of my tumbledown farmhouse in the South of France habitable – could be tricky when the place has only got half a roof.

3.    Don’t just talk about writing my new novel – actually do it.

4.    Don’t shout at 16-year-old L when she won’t get out of bed in the morning.

5.    Don’t shout at 13-year-old N when he leaves his bedroom in a complete tip.

6.    Learn how the wireless network works.

7.    Go for a long country walk at least once a week.

8.    Use every vegetable in my weekly organic box – I’m always stumped by the beetroot and chard.

9.    Declutter, declutter, declutter.

10.  Don’t leave next year’s tax return till January 2009.

The tree is up (at an unintentionally jaunty angle), the cards have all been sent (I think!) and I’m still trying to find the Christmas presents I’ve been hiding for weeks from eagle-eyed teenagers L and N.

There’s sure to be something I’ve forgotten to do but by Christmas Eve it’s too late to worry – so at this stage all I can do is to thank you for reading my blog in 2007 and wish everyone a happy Christmas and wonderful New Year. See you bright and early in 2008...

Schools Secretary Ed Balls’ declaration that the newly-reunited Spice Girls are an inspiration to young girls is utterly mystifying. And depressing.

Apart from Mel C, who can actually sing and seems to have more common sense than the other four put together, they seem vacuous, bland and obsessed with all the things in life that don’t matter. I couldn’t believe what I was reading when Posh said she was thrilled by her most dedicated fans bursting into tears or fainting at the sight of her.

There are thousands of fantastic role models for young girls – and the Spice Girls aren’t among them. Take businesswomen like Martha Lane Fox and SpaceNK founder Nicky Kinnaird, for instance, or writers like JK Rowling and Jacqueline Wilson. Even the stunning supermodel Sophie Dahl isn’t just a pretty face – her first full-length novel Playing with the Grown-Ups is enchanting.

My lovely teenager, L, is 16 in two days time and even though she remembers the Spice Girls from the first time round, there’s no way she and her friends would cite them as role models. Kate Nash, maybe, or Kianna Alarid from Tilly and the Wall – but Posh and her gang? No way.

Impressive, but bonkers. That was the general verdict  on the news that A and his two pals had completed their 50-mile walk through the Oxfordshire countryside in a mind-boggling 20 hours.

He stumbled home at dawn, looking like death, unable to speak and unlikely to ever face eating a ham sandwich or Pret muesli bar, his staple foods on the trek, ever again.

The rest of us, by comparison, had it easy. While A trudged through boggy fields, howling winds and torrential rain, we were sitting happily at the National Theatre, utterly transfixed by the sensational War Horse. Thirteen-year-old N had arrived hotfoot and muddy from a school rugby match and was highly sceptical about the trip at first. But after two and a half hours of watching full-size equine puppets canter across the stage he was entranced. “Wow,” he said over and over again. “That was brilliant, wasn’t it?” When I didn’t say anything he glanced at me. “Why are you crying?” he demanded.

Oh dear.  I’d turned into the most embarrassing mother in the world yet again. But the relief at thoroughbred Joey being reunited with his young owner Albert at the end of the First World War had me in floods all the way back to the tube.

When L and I returned empty-handed from last year’s Secret exhibition at the Royal College of Art (see earlier blog) we vowed to return in 2007.

And that’s exactly what we did at the weekend – with 13-year-old N in tow too this time.

RCA Secret was launched back in 1994 and is now an annual event. Each year hundreds of artists, from penniless students to the likes of Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, create a one-off work of art on a postcard. The public can then buy one of the 2,300 cards on display for £40. The catch is that you don’t know who painted your card till you’ve handed over your money.

Last year we queued for three and a half hours and failed to buy anything. So this time we set the alarm for the crack of dawn and arrived at 6.30am. Big mistake. By the time we got to Kensington Gore the queue was even longer than last year. Some intrepid art fans had pitched sub-arctic style tents on the pavement outside and rumours were flying around in the darkness that they’d been there for three days.

We thought we were well-equipped for the wait with coffee, croissants, iPods and lots of layers of clothing but our efforts paled into insignificance next to the other queuers, most of whom seemed to have sleeping bags, blankets, chairs and ski gear.

When the queue hadn’t moved an inch after 90 minutes N whispered in my ear. “Shall we not bother?” he said. Freezing cold and fed-up, I agreed with alacrity and turned to leave. But L wasn’t having any of it. “Don’t be so feeble,” she told us firmly.

It was an agonising five hours till we got to the front of the queue. By the time we got inside the RCA building we were so numb with cold we could barely speak, let alone make any sense. And just like last year, when we made it to the basement saleroom virtually all the cards we liked had gone. Electronic score boards flashed green for cards that were still available, red for ones that had sold.

Remembering last year’s debacle, when my final choice turned red as I stepped up to the sales desk, I gave up looking. L was made of sterner stuff. She gave us a running commentary as we inched closer and closer to the front. “There’s one of your choices and one of mine – but N’s have all gone,” she told us cheerily.

“Numbers 113 and 1898,” she told the saleswoman, when we finally made it to the front. And guess what? They were still there!

“You were right to make us wait,” I said as we wearily made our way out, clutching our postcards. “But I’m not coming again next year.”

“Nor am I,” said N.

“Well, I am,” said his big sister.

See http://dams.rca.ac.uk/res/sites/RCA_Secret/index.html

Mid-November shouldn’t be this cold. The grey, misty days feel more like February – apart from the fact that it’s dark when L and I leave for the school bus at 7am and even darker when I meet her off it at 5.20pm. Right now I’m sitting huddled at my office desk, wearing three jumpers and sipping a constant stream of Earl Grey to keep warm. The battered old heater I bought in a York hardware store as a student is blowing hot air at my feet but I still can’t get away from the fact that it’s blooming freezing.

The world outside my window looks drab and uninviting so it’s even more of a treat than usual to escape to Carluccio’s to meet Laurence, the daughter of a French friend, who’s doing a language course over here. As soon as we get through the door we’re thrust into a festive paradise, complete with long, stylish tables, smiling waiters and scarlet, blue and orange-wrapped presents dangling from the ceiling. After a glass of wine, a plate of pasta, two hours of catching up on Laurence’s news and even a bit of Carluccio’s Christmas shopping, I emerge into the chilly afternoon air with a spring in my step.

Bright and early every Monday morning a bright yellow van draws up outside our house.

The driver deposits a cardboard box full of organic fruit and vegetables outside the front door, collects last week’s empty container and drives off in his bio-fuelled lorry – leaving me to untie the string, open the box and discover the delights in store this week. The contents are a treat – from aubergines and sweet potatoes to gorgeous clementines and pears – and if customers are stuck for inspiration on what to cook, a recipe sheet is tucked inside the box too.

My Abel and Cole order always gets the week off to a great start but up until now I didn’t know anything about the company’s inspiring co-founder. Keith Abel launched his organic food deliveries in 1991. He now employs 300 staff, supplies organic food to more than 20,000 homes in Greater London alone and has an annual turnover of nearly £20 million. But as a thrusting entrepreneur, he’s far from typical. A feature in The Times says he’s got a reputation for “fairness, passion, integrity and warmth.” Apparently he not only makes a point of sitting down for lunch with staff in the works canteen but encourages everyone to cook for each other using organic ingredients provided by the company.

He’s a great example of an entrepreneur who’s stayed true to his original principles and beliefs. Would-be tycoons – please take note.

Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeek!

The ear-piercing shriek from the top floor reverberated right through our tall, narrow house. It was 10pm and we’d just got back from L’s parents’ evening. Her teachers had said lovely things about her, we’d had a delicious family supper in Oxford and everyone was happily on their way to bed.

We rushed upstairs in panic, wondering what on earth had happened. When we burst into L’s room with a flourish my teenage daughter was jabbing at the air with her hand and pointing hysterically at her curtains.

“What on earth’s the matter?” I asked.

“There's a ladybird invasion,” stuttered L. I looked closer – and sure enough there was. The tiny spotted creatures were all over the place, clinging to the curtains in a neat army-like formation, crawling over the window and flying through the air with the greatest of ease.

“I’m not sleeping here,” said L firmly. She grabbed hold of her mattress, duvet and pillow and dragged them manfully down to the next floor.

Four days later nothing has changed. She’s still camping on the floor below and refusing to go back to her room. We’ve tried putting turmeric on the window frame (I spotted the suggestion on Google and it hasn’t made the slightest difference) and A’s sealed the window with an ugly sheet of polythene, convinced it will keep the annoying orange things out.

If anyone’s got any advice I’d love to hear it!

The news that the Guardian columnist Dina Rabinovitch died today at the age of 44 stopped me in my tracks.

It was only this time last week I was reading her brave piece about how it felt to be terminally ill with breast cancer and be the mother of young children, marvelling at her wisdom and lack of self-pity and entreating everyone to read it.

She wrote dryly of her irritation with doctors who told her to take each day as it comes. "In our forty-something world,” she wrote, “with kids who need packed lunches and walking to school (on days when I may not be able to get out of bed, my husband might have an 8am meeting, and all the older children have morning exams), not to mention the not yet extinct notion of a career, what exactly does that instruction mean, I ponder? Because, honestly, what works as a guideline for a Buddhist monk doesn't make tuna sandwiches on days when you can't face food.”

Dina wrote a book called Take Off Your Party Dress: When Life's Too Busy for Breast Cancer, based on her Guardian columns, and a blog, Take Off Your Running Shoes, to raise money to expand the cancer research team at London's Mount Vernon Cancer Centre. It now stands at an amazing £68,000 and is rising fast.

Why are we so addicted to surveys? The papers are full of them – and the crazier they sound the more column inches they get.

Today’s batch is as eclectic as ever. One says women control the purse strings, another claims most over-60s prefer to work rather than retire and a third reports that short people complain more about their health than lofty types. Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, most new mums reckon the first year of motherhood is the loneliest in their lives. Actually, that’s not all they’re moaning about. A third say they spend all day alone, a quarter say their relationship with their partner is rubbish and two-thirds whinge that they feel cut off from normal life.

Their discontent makes irritating reading. Two weeks after L was born nearly 16 years ago my husband started a new job in Germany and was away from home every Monday to Friday for a year and a half. My mum and my sister worked full-time so they weren’t around and L was a very wide-awake baby who slept for five hours at night if I was lucky – and never in the daytime at all. Her sleeping was so dire that my South London GP referred us to a sleep clinic but that didn’t do any good either. It was years and years before L changed her mind and decided she liked sleeping. The irony is that these days she’d happily doze till lunchtime every weekend if she could.

But despite the solitude and profound lack of sleep I wouldn’t swap those days for anything. L laughs when I tell her about the endless nights of playing soporific Enya tracks to her and about the way I used to climb into her cot and lie beside her in a desperate attempt to get her to nod off. No, looking back, I wouldn’t have had it any other way.

Education secretary Ed Balls declares schools should be doing more to convince teenage girls to play sport.

The impending obesity crisis is so grave that he reckons schools should scrap embarrassing gym kits and offer exciting sporting alternatives like yoga and frisbee.

Great – except lots of teachers are doing it already. Five go-ahead schools in Norfolk began tackling the problem months ago by hiring a “well-being mentor.” The mentor spends time in each school talking to 14 to 16 year old girls who have lost interest in sport and devising strategies to get them running back to the gym.

Looking back on wintery afternoons shivering on the hockey pitch without the faintest clue how to hit the ball, I can quite understand why some girls loathe school games. But letting them wear jogging trousers instead of horrible short shorts, organising single-sex PE classes and putting on activities like dance, gymnastics, trampolining and Pilates has got to help.

It’s not rocket science, is it?

Teenagers get a very bad press but I love L and N being 15 and 13. They’re great company, keep me up to date with essentials like mountain-boarding and Kate Nash and don’t need that minute-by-minute attention of their toddler years.

Actually L’s in great demand for looking after toddlers herself – especially now she’s done a Red Cross babysitting course at school. In fact she knows far more about children than I ever did – she can put an arm in a sling, prepare a bottle and knows exactly what to do if her charges’ parents return home the worst for wear. The answer? Ring her mum and dad and get them to come and collect her.

L likes looking after children (and more to the point, they think she’s great too) and she’s pretty keen on earning some cash to spend on train fares and clothes.

It’s not quite so good being the babysitter’s mum though. Last week L was asked to babysit till one-thirty on a Sunday morning and jumped at the chance. I couldn’t bring myself to go to bed before she got home so I huddled under a blanket downstairs, counting the minutes till she got back. She breezed in right on time and as fresh as a daisy, thrilled at having got the chance to watch satellite TV. Meanwhile I could hardly summon the strength to get upstairs.

“I’m finding this babysitting lark very exhausting,” I told her as she skipped happily up to her room.

It’s supposed to be the It bag of the season. The Nancy bag is designed by Smythson’s creative director Samantha Cameron, wife of the Tory party leader. It’s hand-pleated, eye-catching and capacious and the large version costs a staggering £950. 

It may be selling faster than hot cakes but I was distinctly underwhelmed when I spotted one on sale in Selfridge’s at the weekend. Celebs like Madonna and Cat Deeley clearly love it but I reckon it looks a bit like a crinkled bath cap.

The name has got people talking too. Everyone says it’s called Nancy after two famous Nancys – the writer Nancy Mitford and the designer Nancy Lancaster, who once owned Colefax and Fowler. But I’m convinced that the wonderfully glamorous Nancy Astor was probably an influence as well. She was the first woman MP to take her seat in the House of Commons and was also the grandmother of Lord Astor, Samantha Cameron’s stepfather. Years ago I interviewed Samantha’s stylish mum, Lady Astor, at a country bolthole they owned close to the Scottish Borders and an exquisite array of Edwardian plates collected by Nancy Astor hung in pride of place in the entrance hall. They looked just perfect.

There are moments in your children’s lives when you feel about 103 – and last night was one of them.

It seems no time at all since L, clad in a yellow flower-sprigged pinafore and matching hairband, clung to me as I took her into nursery school for the first time. Now she’s a sophisticated teenager in jeans, Zara jacket and Converse trainers choosing which A levels she’s going to take.

The occasion was a special evening for students at L’s school to outline what happens in the sixth form. It seems a touch on the early side considering there’s still another year (and dreaded GCSEs) to go, but exciting all the same.

One thing I’ve realised as a parent is to keep my mouth firmly shut when it comes to controversial subjects like clothes, music and exam subjects. I learned my lesson early on, when realising L’s aptitude for maths and IT I suggested architecture would be the perfect career to aim for.

“No way,” she said crushingly. “That’s absolutely the last thing I’d dream of doing.”

Now she’s weighing up her A level choices in her own determined way. I still reckon she’d make a brilliant architect though.

I can't wait to get my hands on a copy of Maeve Haran’s new book, Froth on the Cappuccino. Former TV producer Maeve shot to fame with her first novel, Having it All, which questioned whether women really can combine marriage, motherhood and a high-flying career (the answer is probably no!)

Now she’s turned her back on that sort of thing – so 90s, darling - and written a wonderful-sounding book about the simple pleasures of life – delights like wrapping yourself in a warm towel after a bath, unwrapping a bar of chocolate and yes, sipping the froth on a cappuccino.

It may sound too good to be true and a bit like that dreadful children’s classic, Pollyanna - the one where a little girl softens the heart of her wizened old aunt by finding a silver lining in every cloud. But the idea is oddly appealing. So appealing, in fact, that I’ve come up with a list of my own – the clunk of the new Vogue dropping through the letterbox, my teenage daughter L unexpectedly downloading a great new track on to my iPod, a glass of Pinot Grigio with my sister and opening the bread machine in the morning to find a delicious wholemeal loaf that's cooked overnight.

Perfect.

School heads are a redoubtable breed. I’ve just got back from interviewing the super-inspiring head of a leading girls’ school. She wore leopard-skin stilettos, knew every girl in the school by name and when she spotted a pupil using her mobile-phone during school hours (strictly forbidden) showed her supreme displeasure by raising an eyebrow just ever so slightly. She was one of the most impressive people I’ve met in a long time.

But quite apart from the shoes and the raised eyebrows, the thing that stuck in my mind was the advice she gives her pupils.

“If you want to do something then set your mind to it and make it happen,” she tells them. “Think ‘I can and I will succeed.’”

The idea sounds a bit like Just William’s arch enemy Violet Elizabeth Bott (“I’ll thcream and thcream ‘till I’m thick”) stamping her foot to get her own way but I’m definitely going to give it a go. So here’s the plan. Today I’m going to write two articles, finish the next chapter of my new novel, de-clutter the house and book my car in for a service.

I can and I will succeed…

James Jagger could so easily have been one of those spoilt rich kids who drift around London knocking back cocktails at £100 a throw and not getting out of bed till lunchtime.

But Mick Jagger’s son has rebelled against all that by turning into a refreshingly wise 21-year-old. Instead of relying on his dad for hand-outs he’s doing things his way. He’s just made his stage debut in a play called Lone Star at the humble King’s Head Theatre in Islington (a very unstarry venue – and so tiny that the audience can virtually reach out and touch the actors.)

James plays a Texan “village idiot” alongside ex-EastEnders star Shane Ritchie and in a Sunday Times interview says “being lazy” was never an option as far as he was concerned.

“I’ve never really had anything much of an allowance,” he reveals. “I’ve always had a summer job, and my first car was a banger I had to save up for. Dad was brought up to work for what he has, so it’s always been that way for me. If he had always given me everything I asked for, I probably wouldn’t have any motivation to work.”

That boy'll go far, mark my words…

A new report says the typical house-hunter takes all of 17 minutes to make up their mind whether to buy or not. That’s dawdling in my book.

I never thought I’d say this but with August dragging its feet I’m just about ready for the end of the school holidays. The weather’s rubbish, my teenagers have run out of things to do and I’m fed up with explaining to N that “no, I can’t take him mountain-boarding in Herefordshire (only two hours’ drive away!) because I’ve got a piece to write.

L and N haven’t done too badly for holidays so I don’t feel guilty. N’s mountain-biked, rock-climbed and whizzed across a canyon in the Alps (eek!), we’ve knocked my tumbledown farmhouse in the south of France to bits and now the pair of them are doing a sailing course with their cousins. When me and my sister were their age we didn’t do anything as exotic. We spent every day of every school holiday playing a board game called Exploration – which had a weird five-sided dice, incomprehensible rules and no one else has ever heard of.

Today I’ve spent a small fortune on new size 11 rugby boots, scrum cap and trainers for N. So it’s even more vital that L and N get back to school and I get back to work in double-quick time.

Modelling boss Sarah Doukas is famous for spotting Kate Moss waiting for a flight at JFK Airport with her family when she was 14. Asked in an interview this weekend what she’s looking for when she sees a new face the Storm model agency supremo explained: “It’s difficult to define. It’s bone structure, the height, the look, but also it’s just sort of… a feeling.”

There’s got to be a bit of luck involved too. When we were in France recently we popped into a tiny épicerie in a sleepy Provençal village to find a supermodel look-alike being shouted at by her boss for not wrapping a customer’s brie de meaux properly. Verging on six foot tall, with a stunning figure and gorgeous olive skin, she looked like she should have been sashaying down the Paris catwalk, not being yelled at by a grumpy middle-aged grocer.  

It would be great if Sarah Doukas or one of her talent scouts spotted her – but I wouldn’t put money on it happening anytime soon.

The woman in front of me at the local newsagents was in full, and very belligerent, flow. I don’t know who she was talking to on her mobile but she was certainly giving them what-for, effing and blinding away and telling the person at the other end that she b…. wasn’t going to be treated like that.

The middle-aged shop assistant looked stunned by her vitriol. She waited patiently for the woman to finish her call, raised her eyebrows ever-so slightly and then handed over her change. The rude woman grabbed her paper and marched out without saying a word to the assistant. No thank you, no nothing.

What a difference to everyone we met in France. At Anne’s, our favourite boulangerie in Dieulefit, the lovely proprietor is so charming that her customers don’t mind how long they wait to be served. Her pizzas and tartes aux framboises are so delicious that the queue often snakes out of the shop and down the pavement - but no one bats an eyelid.

When we get to the front she always greets us personally, compliments L and N on their French and waits patiently while we fumble to find the right number of euros. She packs everything up into exquisite paper parcels, tells us a bit about her time working in London and wouldn’t dream of letting us leave without a cheery “au revoir, bonne journée.”

You don’t get that in grumpy old England…

Where did all the years go? I still can’t believe that N is now officially a teenager. It seems no time at all since my lovely son was a toddler with white-blond curls and a penchant for Thomas the Tank Engine. Now he’s a strapping 5ft 10in teen who towers over me and is obsessed with mountain-boarding and The Simpsons (the movie got the firm thumbs-up by the way.)

N began his teenage years in huge style – at a party held by friends who’ve bought an amazing house on a Provencal hillside. On the stroke of midnight the hosts sweetly announced N’s 13^th birthday to the Anglo-French gathering, a saxophonist played a jaunty rendition of Happy Birthday and N was presented with a huge slab of chocolate cake. A great way to start his teenage years…

It's a treat being able to buy the British papers at the Presse in Dieulefit's main square every morning. They cost two or three euros but for a newspaper addict like me they’re worth every last cent.

Next stop is Jean’s Café over the road for a coffee and croissant in the sun. It's so hot that the waiter hurries out to extend the awning and give us more shade.

The place is packed with old men drinking Pastis and poring over Le Figaro. We open up our papers and are stunned by the news from home. Half of the Thames Valley has been flooded, with more rain forecast, there’s been an outbreak of foot and mouth in Surrey and Britain’s teenagers have just been declared the worst-behaved in Europe.

Suddenly our pretty sunlit café in the south of France seems the best place in the world to be.

I burst into tears when I set eyes on the house with no name for the first time in four long months. If it looked dilapidated before, it was ten times worse now. Three-foot high thistles sprouted out of the courtyard, the first floor shutters dangled pitifully from their hinges and despite the scorching Provencal heat the whole place smelled of damp.

Standing next to me, 15-year-old L was made of far sterner stuff. She promptly began pulling decades-old wallpaper off the walls and went into raptures about the view across rolling fields towards the imposing Roche Colombe in the distance. Or La Brioche as my friend Jane calls it – because that’s exactly what it looks like.

“When do you think I’ll be able to invite all my friends here?” asked L.

I watched a spiral of faded pink wallpaper float down into the courtyard.

“Maybe about 2020?” I said.

Midnight on Friday 18^th July. L and I drove like the wind through rain-soaked country lanes to buy our copies of the seventh Harry Potter at Borders in Oxford.

When we got there the bookshop was packed solid, with people of all ages queuing round the crime section, past romance and down the escalator into the basement.

The whole place brimmed with excitement and anticipation. A few die-hard fans were dressed up in full Hogwarts regalia and children young and old sported cloaks and wizard hats.

The occasion had only been marred, a shocked Borders assistant told us, by a group of youths who’d pitched up earlier on in the evening wearing T-shirts with details of the long-awaited plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows printed across them. When children read what was written on the T-shirts the horrible youths had taken pictures of their shocked expressions on their mobile phones.

The store promptly ejected the group and warned them not to show their faces again. Luckily for everyone, they didn’t – and we all went home happily clutching our brand-new copies of JK Rowling’s latest triumph.

The news that ITV are filming four of Jilly Cooper’s early novels made my day. I’ve still got my dog-eared copies of Emily, Bella, Harriet, Octavia, Prudence and Imogen and even though I’ve re-read them loads of times I never get sick of them.

Apparently Octavia will be the first novel to hit the TV screen. You know, the one where the tricky heroine Octavia tries to nab her best friend Gussie’s chap and is thwarted by a loudmouth business tycoon called Gareth.

My favourite is Prudence, so I hope it gets filmed as soon as possible. Prudence thinks she’s in love with super-cool barrister Pendle Mulholland (actually he’s just plain weird) but he’s in love with his brother’s wife Maggie. Then there’s his recently widowed – and very intimidating – other brother Ace, who disapproves of the whole lot of them. It’s set in a rambling mansion in the Lake District – and will make compulsive viewing. I can’t wait!

Michael Wright’s column in the Daily Telegraph on Saturdays is my favourite read of the week. I’m so gripped by his tales of leaving South London for an exciting new life in a dilapidated farmhouse in France (complete with chickens, over-sexed sheep and scary power tools to contend with) that I emailed him a fan letter. I haven’t done that since I was nine years old and wrote to the long-defunct Treasure magazine asking if Mr Answers could send me his autograph.

Before I knew it my fan letter had turned into an anxious missive about how Michael’s uplifting book inspired me to buy the house with no name – a tumbledown wreck with a roof that’s fallen in and years and years of building work ahead of me.

But suddenly an email from Michael came winging back, cheering me up no end with its positive talk.

“The secret with your farmhouse is, I think, to make friends with some of the local French and to ask around, and ask around, and ask around, about a good maçon/charpente who is ‘sérieux’,” he wrote. “Make friends with this man, and make him feel that he wants to help you. Ask him to recommend people, too, to do the things that he won't touch. And so on... One day it will be, I feel sure, a wonderful house again...”

I feel a million times better already.

A flash of metal spokes, a brief glimpse of a fluorescent pink helmet – and that was it. The cyclist had rounded the corner at death-defying speed and disappeared before we had time to blink.

It was fantastic to see the Tour de France depart from London at the weekend. We emerged into the afternoon sun from Billy Elliot to see something equally breathtaking unfolding before our very eyes. We watched awestruck as some of the race’s 189 cyclists whizzed along Buckingham Gate on the prologue sprint trial – reaching speeds of up to 44mph (fast enough to trigger speed cameras!) This was the first time the Tour de France had ever started in England in its 104-year history and the whole crowd knew we were witnessing something special.

I first became captivated by the Tour de France when we stayed in Provence a few years ago. One afternoon we drove up the long, winding road to the summit of windswept Mont Ventoux. Halfway up we spotted a small stone memorial littered with water bottles and cycling paraphernalia and realised it marked the spot where the legendary Tom Simpson died of heat stroke and heart failure during the 1967 Tour. His career was marred by his admission that he’d used banned drugs but 40 years later he still inspires awe and affection for his amazing endurance and will to win. His last words are said to have been “put me back on my bike” and they sum up everything about the Tour de France. This year the cyclists will cover 3,500 kilometres in just three weeks, ending up in the Champs-Elysees on July 29. Bonne chance!

“You’d better not watch this,” said N nervously as he looked up from the TV.

I panicked, worried that my 12-year-old son was watching something scarily unsuitable.

In fact it was a repeat of the innocuous Channel 4 programme No Going Back, which follows the trials and tribulations of people escaping the rat-race to start a new life abroad.

This one told the tale of a couple called Mac and Laura McKay who swapped leafy Chiswick for a house in Provence. A story after my own heart – except that along with their exciting new life they also got ropey plumbing pouring raw sewage into the garden and a heating system that could have killed them.

N was alarmed that the McKays’ horror story might make me put the ruined French farmhouse I bought three months ago straight back on the market and pretend the whole thing never happened. He hurriedly switched off the TV and began talking 13 to the dozen about mountain-boarding instead.

So what are the latest developments down at the house with no name? Well very few, actually. The next-door neighbour’s scrawled my name on the letterbox, the farmer’s cut the grass for me and I’ve been thinking about what colour I’d like to paint the shutters. Hmm – perhaps a tasteful shade of pale grey. Other than that, there’s worryingly little to report – and for a born worrier like me, that’s worrying in itself!

A new report says school corridors are being turned into no-go zones, with one in five teachers avoiding certain areas for fear of being attacked by pupils. Some schools are so worried they’ve brought in their own police officers, CCTV and even airport-style weapon scanners.

Fearne Cotton’s TV interview with Prince William and Prince Harry wasn’t incisive or revealing – but it did remind me of my one and only conversation with Princess Diana.

In 1984 I was a feature writer on Woman’s Own magazine, covering everything from stories we thoughtlessly called TOTs (Triumph over Tragedy, I’m afraid) to pop interviews. Now and again I try and impress L and N with stories about the days when I rubbed shoulders with George Michael and Morrissey but they roll their eyes with boredom.

Anyway, for some reason, Princess Diana asked to visit Woman’s Own one wintery afternoon. She was expecting Prince Harry at the time but when she walked into the features department she looked incredibly thin and drawn - in a grey coat-dress that drained all the colour from her face.

The editor had instructed all her writers to sit at our desks and look as if we were working – which was difficult, of course, with a royal superstar in our midst. By the time Diana got to my desk I think she’d probably run out of questions so I asked her the first thing that popped into my head. “Who’s your favourite pop band?”

She replied with alacrity. “All the papers say Duran Duran are my favourites but that’s not right,” she said. “I like Supertramp best.”

Supertramp weren't exactly cutting edge at the time and it was hardly the scoop of the century – but I laughed out loud when Prince William listed his mum’s favourite music in their interview with Fearne. Elton John, George Michael, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Bryan Adams – and yes, SUPERTRAMP!

Mornings have never been my strong point. I rush out of the house at 7.10am looking as if I’ve been pulled through a hedge backwards - without a scrap of make-up and my hair sticking up on end. After I’ve dropped L at the bus stop I pop into the supermarket to buy the papers, hoping I don’t scare the man on the checkout or bump into someone I know.

But now I feel positively chic and well-groomed compared to some mums. Because at least I’m dressed.

A Belfast primary head is so appalled at the number of mums arriving at his school in their nighties and pyjamas to drop off their children that he’s appealed to them to show a little more respect. Known as the “pyjama mamas,” some mothers wear baggy pyjamas and fluffy mules while others go for dressing gowns and curlers. Not a good look.

The head told his local paper: “There used to be about 15 to 20 pyjama-wearing parents, but there are anything up to 50 now, all women. People don’t go to see a solicitor, bank manager or doctor dressed in pyjamas, so why do they think it’s OK to drop their children off at school dressed like that?”

I was frightened witless by the government’s nannyish warnings about alcohol this week. I look forward to a glass (or two!) of chilled white wine at home every night and never think twice about it. But now I stand accused of being a potential danger to the NHS and society as a whole. Eeek!

So in the interests of research I’ve managed two nights this week without drinking any alcohol at all. My experiment was shot to pieces, though, when I visited the hugely disappointing Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. The Hockney picture was the size of a house but not half as spectacular as I’d expected (and it definitely didn’t look like East Yorkshire). There were some vile aluminium and plastic creations at £70,000 a throw and loads of animal paintings that bored me to tears.

Halfway round the desultory show my generous sister bought me a glass of champagne and after that the pictures improved a lot. I looked at my watch and gaped. It was only 11am and I’d knocked it back in a trice. So much for my abstinence experiment. But I cheered up on the train home when I read about Prince William. He’s been spotted walking out of Asda with £850-worth of wine, beer, Pimm’s, vodka and rum. That's one hell of a party.

“That’s rubbish,” said N as he pored over the front pages this morning. “A three-year-old could have done better.”

He was right, of course. The startling new 2012 Olympics logo is supposed to be vibrant and youthful but in fact it’s a garish joke that will look hopelessly outdated in five years time. Or as design guru Stephen Bayley so eloquently put it, it’s “a puerile mess, an artistic flop and a commercial scandal.”

But back to N and his ability to get right to the heart of things. This is the boy who, when he was introduced to the concept of “estimating” in a primary maths class, gazed uncomprehendingly at the jar of pencils plonked in front of him and asked “Why can’t we just count them?”

At 12, N is part of the generation the logo is aimed at – so if he and his pals think it’s rubbish I reckon the designers should definitely go back to the drawing board…

It’s more than a year since I started my blog and I’m right back where I started.

I wrote my first entry sitting on a bench at the local park watching my intrepid son N perform scary stunts on his skateboard. Now, 15 months on, I’m back on the same bench – a bit older, no wiser, and still pretending I’m not here (N thinks it’s too sissy by half to be accompanied by his mum.)

The youths on BMX bikes sit at the top of the skate ramp swearing like troopers and shocking people out walking their dogs but N seems tough enough to cope. He’s six inches taller than this time last year, takes whopping size ten shoes and is even more of a daredevil on wheels.

Oh dear. I’ve just looked up from what I’m writing and N’s gone splat. The intimidating youths laugh – but stoical as ever, N gets back on his board and whizzes off again.

I’m having sleepless nights again, wondering where to start with the tumbledown farmhouse I’ve bought in the south of France. Not only that, I’m having trouble explaining where it even is. When I tell people the house with no name is in the Drôme they all look blank. Sometimes I think I’ve imagined the whole thing.

My mum’s desk was always covered with bits of newspaper. She used to rip pages out of papers and magazines and put them on one side to write about in her column.

It must be a family trait because I can’t resist collecting articles either. One of my current favourites is a Daily Telegraph feature about the essence of happiness. Someone had the brilliant idea of asking an eclectic bunch of interviewees whether happiness can be taught. The dynamic Anthony Seldon, Tony Blair’s biographer and recently-appointed head of Wellington College, has put happiness lessons on the school curriculum so he obviously thinks it can. But my favourite comment comes from an 11-year-old called Olivia Garner, who's got more sense than the rest of them put together.

“Happiness can’t really be taught because you don’t want to think about needing to be happy,” she says. “If you think too much about being happy then you will be much more aware when you are not happy and will be wondering all the time if you are being happy.”

She’s absolutely right, of course. Happiness is an elusive thing and it’s best not to think about it too much. But just for today, I reckon I’m happy. The white daisies I’ve planted in terracotta pots by the back door are blooming, my teenage daughter L’s rung to tell me she loves me (she said the complete opposite on Sunday) and my optician made me laugh when he informed me I'm wearing my contact lenses the wrong way round. The worrying thing is that I hadn’t even noticed…

With rain dripping down the back of our necks and our feet completely sodden, L and I looked a sorry sight as we huddled together under our umbrella.

We were standing at Dorney Lake, where all the Olympic rowing events will be held in 2012, proudly watching N row his socks off. The weather was so dismal that four children got carted off under aluminium blankets suffering from hypothermia but N’s made of stern stuff. Even though his lips were blue and his teeth chattering he refused to throw in the towel.

We’d taken three sets of rowing gear for him to change into but he got through them in a trice and I had to buy two more lots from a clothing company doing a roaring trade in a sodden tent.

N got to the final of his event- which promptly made us forget how freezing we were and race along the bank yelling support. He came a noble fifth and was so exhausted by the effort of it all that he gulped back a bottle of Lucozade and promptly fell asleep.

At last! The house with no name belongs to us. It’s taken seven long months, lots of sleepless nights and a shaky moment when the mystery of the missing oak trees looked like it might scupper the deal altogether. But I’ve gone ahead and signed the papers and am now the proud owner of a derelict farmhouse in the south of France – complete with a dodgy roof, half a wood and a battered old tractor the brothers left behind. At the moment the house is empty, apart from a hideous red deckchair we bought from the local supermarket – but I’m sure it’ll be lovely one day.

Looking back, it’s clear I did everything completely wrong. Peter Mayle, the man who made thousands of us fantasise about a new life of lavender, sunflowers and vineyards, offered his advice to newspaper readers this week about how to go about finding a house in France and reading it, I feel more daft than ever.

Number one: “Don’t be a rush to buy.” Oh dear. I bought the first house I saw.

Number two: “See what you think of France in winter before you plunge in.” Hmmm. I saw the house with no name on a sunny October day and leapt in without a backward glance.

Number three: “Get an expert to take a look at the place.” No, I didn’t ask a surveyor to give it the once over either.

Mad, I know, but I really am sure it will be lovely one day.

Poor teachers.

As if they didn’t have enough on their plates, the government has now declared that secondary teachers should teach “emotional intelligence” too.

The idea is that if children are taught how to play fairly at school then behaviour in the classroom will improve.

Why on earth hard-pressed teachers should be lumbered with this I don’t know. How are they going to find time to lead “emotional intelligence” classes in between teaching, planning lessons and marking exam papers?

When I interviewed National Governors’ Association chair Judith Bennett recently she had very firm views on disruptive behaviour in schools.

“Everyone talks about behaviour in schools but schools mirror society,” Judith, a former secondary teacher herself, told me. “Yes, there are discipline problems and yes, there are extremely badly-behaved youngsters in schools but so are there in society. I get tired on behalf of heads and teachers of the notion that they are basically responsible for everything and need to put everything right.

“That is far too simplistic. There isn’t a recipe for good behaviour. It very much depends on parental support. If children have a secure background then on the whole they are much less likely to cause difficulties in school. If they have supportive parents who are interested in them and their learning, talk to them and listen, then a child has a much better chance of growing up into a teenager who is neither troubled nor troublesome.”

The dawn patrol at my local supermarket is a motley crew. Most weekday mornings there are a few pensioners shopping while it’s quiet, builders buying sandwiches for their lunch-boxes and an elderly cyclist who walks up and down the aisles wearing a bike helmet with a jaunty feather on top.

I pop in at 7.20am everyday to buy the newspapers and I’m usually out in a flash. But this morning the place was packed. “Why are there so many people here today?” I asked the man on the till. His eyes rolled. “They’ve been queuing since midnight to buy those Anya Hindmarch bags,” he said, clearly astonished as to why customers should give up their beauty sleep to buy a simple canvas bag with rope handles for £5.

You’ve got to hand it to Anya Hindmarch. She’s a brilliant designer and her idea to create a bag to help save the planet was nothing short of genius. When her chic “I’m not a plastic bag” was launched at her London shop earlier this year shoppers queued round the block to get their hands on one.

This morning a new consignment went on sale at Sainsbury’s stores across the country – apparently each branch got just 30 bags – and they sold out in a trice. I’ve just looked on eBay and there’s a rash of them for sale, many of them retailing for more than £100, and sure to go higher.

So did I join the queue this morning?

Well, I would have. But by 7.20am I'd missed the boat completely.

Sunday mornings always start a bit too early for my liking. The alarm goes off at 7am – when I have to drag myself out of bed and drive N halfway across the next county to go rowing on the river Nene with his pals.

It’s hell leaving at dawn in dark, dismal February but it’s not half so bad now spring is here. This morning we didn’t see a soul as we drove through the glorious Northamptonshire lanes, past fields of bright yellow oilseed rape and sleepy villages bathed in early morning sunlight.

N is at his enthusiastic best first thing in the morning – excited about the prospect of a hearty rowing session, looking forward to catching up with friends from his old school and eager to debate everything from the merits of Ferraris to the sweltering conditions awaiting today’s London Marathon runners.

Ninety minutes later I creep back into a still-slumbering house – with the Sunday papers, a delicious coffee and a couple of hours of peace to look forward to. Bliss!

Today was one of those Wednesdays when I wanted to open the paper and read what my mum had written about the royal break-up. Well, not so much about the break-up, more about the pasting poor Kate Middleton’s mum is getting for chewing gum and saying “toilet” instead of “lavatory.”

Some of the snooty remarks attributed to Prince William’s pals sound far-fetched to say the least but my mum would have been gripped. She came from a Lancastrian working-class background and was always fascinated by class. As a little girl she longed to be one of those posh schoolgirls from Enid Blyton’s Malory Towers books. She wanted to play lacrosse, live in a big detached house and use words like “spiffing” and “super” all the time.

Later on my mum wrote a book called Class Act, chronicling her journey from her terraced house in Leigh to marrying my dad, who came from a “posh” family. One of my favourite bits was her recollection of winning a highly-prized place at a top London drama school.

“I got on the train at Warrington Bank Quay station with a Lancashire accent and got off at Euston without it, which meant I had to speak very slowly for a very long time,” she wrote. “My fellow students at drama school mostly came from middle-class families and I kept my background to myself. I used to describe my father as a painter, without adding 'and decorator.' This made things very tricky when people asked what kind of pictures he painted. ‘Sort of abstract,’ I said."

The daffodils danced in the breeze as the funeral cortege slowly made its way through the quiet Dorset village where my grandmother spent the last 20 years of her life.

She died on 1^st April at the age of 95 and yesterday we marked her passing at the pretty church just along the lane from her house. She was a stickler for doing things properly but I think she would have approved. Everyone wore black, the hymns were old favourites like Jerusalem and the church was filled with cascades of lilies and white roses.

As I stood in church I thought back to the annual summer holidays we spent with my grandparents at their cottage in North Devon. We’d buy picnics of Cornish pasties and Kunzel cakes at Mr Moon’s old-fashioned grocery shop on the corner, go for long windswept walks across Saunton Sands and try and steer clear of my grandmother’s two yappy Dachsund dogs, who were liable to take a bite out of your ankles if you weren’t careful. Every Saturday morning my sister and I walked into Braunton to spend our pocket money on Enid Blyton books, tiny bottles of Devon violets and Refresher sweets – much to the disapproval of my grandmother, who thought we should be more frugal.

I’d forgotten all about those long summer days till yesterday. But during the service the memories came flooding back, and I was glad.

Maybe I’ve led a sheltered life but I’ve never been closeted in a room with seven men before.

But that’s what happened when it came to signing the papers for The house with no name. The small matter of the eight missing oak trees still hadn’t been cleared up but the notaire went ahead anyway and set out seven chairs, which were duly filled by seven men. There was my notaire, the seller’s notaire, the estate agent, the three brothers selling the property, husband A – and me.

My notaire, dressed for the occasion in a snazzy pin-striped suit and black polo neck, cleared his throat authoritatively and the room fell silent. The buyer was most concerned, he told the gathering gravely, to discover that a clump of oak trees bordering the farmhouse had been cut down and removed. What had happened?

The brothers didn’t shed much light on the matter, offering a couple of lame excuses about “clearing up” the grounds and giving young saplings more room to grow. The upshot was that the estate agent deftly negotiated a few euros off the price and eventually the sale was back on again.

The only trouble is that I’m stricken with guilt.

“How will the price reduction work?” asked A.

“It will be taken off the share of the person concerned,” said the estate agent firmly.

Oh dear. I’m pretty sure I know who the person concerned is. I suspect he was selling the wood to make a few extra euros on the side and now I feel like a heel.

My lightning decision to make an offer for The house with no name in the first place was prompted by the sudden realisation that life is short and that if there’s something you want to do you’d better get on with it. This time three years ago my dynamic mum was busier than ever, writing her Daily Mail column, fixing up interviews and still finding time to invite us all to Dorset for Easter. Six months later she was dead.

So last year I resolved to do something life-changing and brave. L and N are growing up fast and I wanted to enjoy holidays in France with them before they go off and do their own thing.

When I first set eyes on The house with no name there were two things that convinced me to buy my wreck of a farmhouse. One was the terrace, where generations of farmers have sat under the old plane tree and put the world to rights over a glass of pastis. The other was a pretty sunlit field, bordered at one end by a coppice of distinguished-looking oak trees. I could just imagine long summer lunches there, with L sketching and N pottering about on his scooter.

Except when we pitched up last week to complete the sale, the oak trees had vanished into thin air. Or to be strictly accurate, eight trees had been chopped down in their prime, leaving eight newly-sawn stumps in their place.

We drove straight to the notaire’s office to try and get to the bottom of the mystery of the missing oak trees. Monsieur Mallet looked stunned at the news. He’d come across houses where sellers had taken the odd light-bulb or radiator, he told us – but not eight “chenes.”

The notaire pored over the hefty file for The house with no name for a few minutes. I stared at him expectantly, waiting for him to tell us what to do next.

But he didn’t.

“Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire?” he said finally.

“What are we going to do?”

What indeed?

Quelle drama!

Up until last week buying a wreck in the south of France seemed like a piece of cake. Admittedly I’d done everything completely back to front. When I consulted friends with houses across the Channel they firmly advised me to buy a place in an area I could drive to in a few hours. They said I should look at loads of property and choose a place that didn’t need much building work. Preferably none at all.

So what on earth possessed me to make an offer on the first ever house I clapped eyes on? A house that’s 100 miles south of Lyon, a good ten hours’ drive from the ferry - and completely uninhabitable to boot?

It wasn’t even love at first sight. My first thought when I drove up the pot-holed drive to view The house with no name was that it looked like Alcatraz, California’s infamous jail. Worse still, it looked like Alcatraz with a trio of satellite dishes, intimidating wire fence and a scary-looking Alsatian.

But on the plus side the house was set on a south-facing hillside - with a pretty wood, gorgeous terrace and loads of potential. All it would take to make it beautiful, I reckoned, was hard work, imagination and a giant leap of faith.

It's taken months (and many sleepless nights) for the sale to go through but finally all the paperwork was completed and I travelled south to sign on the dotted line.

The sun was shining when I got there and the house looked like it had undergone a Trinny and Susannah makeover without its satellite dishes. But something was wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it but a vital part of the place was missing. I racked my brains to try and work it out. What on earth was it?

It’s a whole 48 hours since I waved L and N off on their school trips and it’s horribly quiet around here. I’ve read the papers, cooked supper for one and don’t know what to do next. l’m even missing L’s latest Patrick Wolf download being played at top volume for the umpteenth time so things must be bad.

But just as I’m starting to feel really sorry for myself up pops a text from L. She’s spent the morning at a French lycée, visited a silk factory, spoken loads of French (so she claims!) and even dared to eat Quiche Lorraine for the first time. She’s also heard from N over the border in Italy. He’s sitting in a pizzeria in Aosta and says he’s had a great day skiing “very fast.” Help!

But the last line of my daughter’s text is the best bit. “I miss you,” says L. “Being here makes me realise how nice it is at home.”

I read it over and over again.

The house is eerily quiet – no thundering of feet on the stairs, no heavy metal blaring out from the middle floor and no screechy electric guitar chords from the top.

L and N have both set off on school trips at precisely the same time and I hate it.

L’s gone to France to practise her French in the run-up to GCSEs and N’s en route to Italy with his pals to go skiing. He didn’t seem fazed in the least by the prospect of 18 hours on a coach to get there. He packed a sleeping bag to keep warm overnight, a mountain of sandwiches and a week’s worth of Anthony Horowitz CDs L downloaded onto his iPod. "It'll be fine," he said stoically.

We waved them off one at a time and although I felt like bursting into tears I managed not to. They’d never forgive me for being a wimp, especially not in front of their friends.

But L knows me better than I know myself. When I got back to the car there was a note on the front seat. I don’t know how my lovely 15-year-old managed to smuggle it there without me noticing but she did.

“Dear Mummy,” it said in bright blue felt tip. “Here is a note on behalf of me and N. Have a really nice week! Take advantage of the fact that we’re not there – it doesn’t happen very often! Miss you lots but see you soon. Lots of love from L and N.”

I always knew I was a coward. And now I know for sure.

I’ve been dreading the phone call for months. But suddenly it’s real.

“The paperwork’s all in place,” booms Monsieur Mallet down the phone from the south of France. “When can you come and sign?”

Monsieur Mallet is the notaire who’s handling my purchase of the most rundown farmhouse you’ve ever set eyes on. He clearly thinks I’m mad to be contemplating such a thing but short of barring my way up the pot-holed drive he has done his utmost to be helpful.

Under French law, once you’ve exchanged contracts and had a ten-day cooling-off period to change your mind (why on earth didn't I?) there’s no going back.

So in two days time I’ve got to transfer my wodge of cash into euros and send it to France. And this time next week I’ll be sitting on the TGV speeding through the French countryside to renew my acquaintance with Monsieur Mallet and sign on the dotted line.

Watch this space…

Education Secretary Alan Johnson says every secondary school should have a bookshelf of boys’ adventure stories in its library to encourage boys to read more.

It sounds sensible but then again it’s not exactly rocket science. Most schools I’ve come across do it already.

At 12 my son N is a typical boy – i.e. he far prefers skateboarding, playing on the xBox and messing about on his bike to sitting in lessons at school. But unlike some of his pals he’s also a voracious reader.

Part of the reason, I’m sure, is that we’re all mad on reading in our house and every room is piled high with books. N was gripped from the moment he started bringing home those dreaded Biff and Chip books from school. We joined a library, spent loads of Saturday mornings in the bookshop and over the years reading just became part of his DNA – nearly as important as skateboarding in fact.

N likes ripping yarns full of action, adventure and daring deeds. He's worked his way through all Anthony Horowitz’s novels, as well as Robert Muchamore’s Cherub series and Charlie Higson’s Young Bond trilogy. His latest discovery is Joe Craig, who writes the Jimmy Coates adventure books. N finds them so gripping he reads them under the bedcovers till 11 most nights.

Next week we’re going to a talk by Anthony Horowitz at the Oxford Literary Festival and N can’t wait – not just to hear what his hero has got to say but also to get his hands on his new novel, the eagerly anticipated Nightrise.

The recommendation that learning a foreign language should be compulsory for primary school children (about time too) reminded me of L’s initiation into the art of speaking French.

My lovely 15-year-old started at an école maternelle in Orléans, on the banks of the Loire, at the age of four. She was the only non-French speaking child in the whole school and when I left her that first day she looked petrified at the prospect of not being able to communicate.

Her French school was a world apart from the nursery class in Blackburn she’d left behind. L loved walking home for lunch everyday and not having any school on Wednesdays. But she hated having to sleep on a mat for an hour in the afternoons (“some children take dummies,” she told me indignantly), learning swirly French writing and not being able to chatter nineteen to the dozen to the other children in the class.

After two days of her new régime she stomped home in a complete strop. “I’ve been here for two days and I still haven’t learned how to speak French,” she said crossly.

But within weeks she’d picked up a smattering of the language and could soon count to ten, order croissants at the bakery and greet her new best friend Philippine.

Ten years on, L’s still a firm Francophile and even though lots of secondary pupils drop languages like a hot coal at the age of 14 L hasn’t. Which is great by me.

N came thundering downstairs with a look of horror on his face.

“What is THAT?” he shrieked, gesticulating wildly at my iPod.

”THAT,” I said happily, “is my new Tracey Thorn single. L downloaded it for me.”

“Well, it’s terrible,” said N. “It sounds just like 1980s dance music.”

I could have taken offence at my son's scathing tone but actually, he had a point. With its electric synthesiser and Tracey Thorn’s distinctive deadpan voice, it sounds exactly like 1980s dance music. That’s why I like it.

Twenty years ago Tracey Thorn was one half of Everything but the Girl with her husband Ben Watt. She gave it all up to be a full-time mum seven years ago - but now she’s back with her first solo album in 24 years.

N might be appalled but I’m overjoyed. Just listening to Thorn’s dulcet tones transports me straight back to my studio flat off Clapham Common. I’d stagger home from a hard day door-stepping Fergie for the Evening Standard (she lived round the corner in Lavender Gardens so it was always me who got sent to ask the key questions - like when she was getting married, how many O-levels she had and what the initials GB on her necklace stood for). I’d pour myself a glass of Chardonnay, make a piece of toast (I didn’t possess a cooker) and if it wasn’t Everything but the Girl playing on the ropey old cassette recorder it’d be Human League or Paul Weller. One of Peter Gabriel's guitarists lived in the flat below so I had to play my music extra loud to drown his out. 

N’s right, of course. It was all SO last century.

When my daughter L was six weeks old and I was grey-faced and jibbering through lack of sleep, a friend invited us to supper. L too, of course.  I’d barely been out of the house since L’s birth - mainly because I found it impossible to get L fed and dressed, me fed and dressed and as for the complicated fold-up pram, forget it. It was easier not to bother.

When we got there, an hour and a half late, I spent the whole evening either feeding L or trying to get her to sleep. Pretty unsuccessfully on both counts. But the main thing that sticks in my mind are my friend’s words as we left at midnight. L was sleeping sweetly in my arms by this time and looked angelic.

“You may think it’s hard looking after a baby,” said my friend, a mother of four children aged between five and 17. “But just you wait till she’s a teenager. You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

How right she was. These days the papers are full of stories about the stresses and strains of looking after babies and toddlers but no one ever says anything about the trials and tribulations of bringing up teenagers.

My two, at 12 and 15, are gorgeous, fun and (mostly) appreciative but they’re also trickiness personified. They both tower over me, laugh their heads off at my taste in music and won’t go to sleep at night. L thinks I’m unreasonable because I tell her to brush her hair for school and not to wear laddered tights (she doesn’t take any notice) and my son N says I’m ridiculous because I won’t let him rent 15-certificate games for his Xbox.

It’s great they’ve got minds of their own, I know, but I just wish they’d occasionally turn to me and say: “No problem. You’re absolutely right!”

I’m completely addicted to Judith O’Reilly’s entertaining Wife in the North blog – www.wifeinthenorth.com  The ex-Sunday Times education correspondent brilliantly chronicles her bewilderment at finding herself transported from her exciting London life to the wilds of Northumberland - with three young children in tow, a half-renovated cottage and a largely absent husband. It’s lonely, mystifying and a very very long way from the rest of the planet.

I know exactly how she feels. Mainly because I’ve been there myself. When L was four and N two we moved to a tiny village in North Yorkshire – and I absolutely hated it. The North York Moors were stunning but when you’ve got two little children you don’t exactly spend much time striding across the heather-clad hillsides. Our village had no shop, a post office that opened one afternoon a week and a pub where the farmers sat and stared if you dared to pop in for a glass of wine (which was hardly ever). You were a newcomer as far as they were concerned till you'd lived there for at least 20 years. The day we moved in our removal lorry knocked a few stones off a wall and a villager threatened to report us to the parish council.

There were a few compensations. The village school was fantastic and L’s friends were all on the doorstep - but that’s about all. I can honestly say I’ve never felt so miserable in my life. I rang my mum every day to stay sane and lived for the odd jaunt to York or the multiplex cinema 20 miles up the A19 in Teesside.

And when we moved on four years later I didn’t regret it for a minute.

Once seen it’s never forgotten. A purple clapboard house set on a hairpin bend three miles up a Cumbrian mountainside, it’s one of the most extraordinary properties I’ve ever set eyes on.

We visit the Lake District at least a couple of times a year and driving past the house, en route for a walk around Buttermere, none of us ever fail to exclaim at how weird it looks. Purple sounds quite appealing but this isn’t an insipid lilac. This is full-on purple, the shade you’d expect to find in a seedy 70s nightclub, and even more incongruous halfway up the isolated Newlands Valley, where sheep usually outnumber people several hundred times over.

L and N reckon the place is haunted but I’ve discovered it has a very starry past. An exalted list of actors, including the likes of Tom Courtney, Bob Hoskins and Victoria Wood, stayed there while they were performing in rep in Keswick and the late poet laureate Ted Hughes was a frequent guest too.

The house – I’m sorry, it may be called Rigg Beck but it’s The Purple House as far as I’m concerned – has been in a sorry state for the last couple of years, windows boarded up and porch delapidated.  But now it’s on the market and apparently loads of househunters are casing the joint, eager to knock it down and start all over again.

One of the best things about being a children’s author (novice) is that schools invite you into their classrooms to talk about writing and books. I’ve visited loads in the last few months and the one valuable lesson that I’ve learned is this. You can prepare your talk as precisely as a military campaign but you’ll always get at least a couple of questions that leave you completely lost for words. Or in my case gabbling like a maniac and making no sense.

This morning I pitched up at a primary school a couple of miles from where I live, clutching a copy of The Rise and Shine Saturday Show and some of my favourite children’s books (Madeline, The Swish of the Curtain and Clarice Bean.) After half an hour of talking to the four to seven year olds (and them talking to me about their passion for Batman and Barbie books), the key stage two group lot were escorted in by their teachers.

I told them a bit about my career and how I write, read the opening chapter of Rise and Shine and then invited them to ask me some questions. Scores of hands immediately shot up. That was great – you don’t want a school-hall full of bored children. Their questions were searching and incisive, ranging from where writers get their ideas from to my favourite children’s books. That was easy – I thrust my battered old copies of Madeline and The Swish of the Curtain in the air.

But then like a bunch of seasoned newspaper hacks, the children began lobbing in a few trickier questions. Do I spend more time writing than looking after my children? How many books will I write in my lifetime? And then they cut to the chase with a belter – how much do I earn? Cue a long silence, followed by a lot of nonsensical gabbling.

I bet Manchester University can’t believe its luck in nabbing novelist Martin Amis as its new Professor of Creative Writing.

Amis is widely regarded as one of Britain’s most eminent writers but he’s never tried his hand at teaching before. Now, at the age of 57, the glamorous former enfant terrible of the writing world admits it’s always been an ambition of his to teach and he’s keen to give it a go.

I spent a year studying for an MA in novel-writing at Manchester University under the tutelage of novelist Richard Francis and Carcanet Press founder Michael Schmidt, so I was fascinated to hear about this starry new appointment. My interest was tempered with a healthy degree of scepticism. It’s hard, after all, to imagine Martin Amis pitching up at early morning seminars at the university campus just off the grey Oxford Road, mug of coffee in one hand and a sheaf of students’ writing in the other.

But after listening to Martin Amis on Radio Four’s Front Row tonight I’ve completely changed my tune. In the space of ten minutes he offered some of the best advice on writing I’ve heard in a long time. He warned that writing is solitary and introspective and urged writers to concentrate on their individuality, find their own voice and avoid clichés.

I reckon students who get on to Manchester’s postgraduate creative writing course will be counting their lucky stars they’ve got him as a tutor. Whoops – there goes yet another cliché. Amis would have me chucked off the course in a trice.

A huge grin lit up N’s face as he galloped down the stairs at top speed. “Wow - look outside,” he shrieked at the top of his voice. “IT’S SNOWED.”

He did a double-take when he glanced into L’s room and saw his elder sister was still lying in bed. He checked the clock on the stairs. Seven-thirty already. “What’s she doing here?” he yelled. “Why isn’t she on the bus? Hey, does that mean I don’t have to go to school either?”

Most of the time I feel exactly the same as I did when I was 12 - N’s age. But snow makes me feel very very old. N gazes wondrously at the back garden, five inches deep in snow, and thinks: “Sledges, snowmen, snowball fights." Before I know it he’s grabbed a hotchpotch of clothes and is unlocking the back door, desperate to launch himself outside. I look at the snowy road outside and think: “How annoying! I’ve got a ton of deadlines and now L and N won’t be able to go to school.”

My two weren’t the only ones who didn’t get to school as it turned out. When I switched on the local radio station a DJ was patiently reciting the vast number of schools that were shut – a staggering 250 in Oxfordshire alone.

The upside of all this is that N’s been as happy as Larry all day. He’s been through four changes of clothes (all those snowballs!) but doesn’t give a stuff. He’s built a snowman that’s taller than me, skidded about on an old sledge that hasn’t seen action for years and even helped two women get their cars going at the back of our house. “I’ve had a great day,” he says. “Do you think it might snow again tonight?”

The garden path was covered in frost when L and I left the house at dawn. The car windscreen needed de-icing and the heater was on the blink. But despite the sub-zero temperature and the fact that her teeth were chattering my style-conscious 15-year-old refused point-blank to wear a coat.

This morning was nothing new. L shoved her regulation navy school fleece to the back of the wardrobe years ago and ignores my constant entreaties to get it out again. She maintains there’s only one girl in her year who still wears a school fleece and she’s certainly not joining her.

L’s hatred of coats is a complete mystery. I tried to make her wear a Zara one of mine a few months ago but she wouldn’t touch it with a bargepole. Even when we go for wintry walks in the country she throws on a short canvas jacket from River Island which has no warmth whatsoever.

The only comfort is that L’s not the only teenager with an aversion to coats. Walking past a gaggle of girls the other evening (it was ten pm and while I was on my way back from the cinema, they were just setting out), I shivered with cold. They all wore strappy dresses, bare legs and NO COATS. I pulled my ankle-length coat tighter round me and hurried home to hunt out some thermals and a hot-water bottle.

Homework battles loom large in most families – and ours is no exception. L, in her pre-GCSE year, gets masses every night. She carries a rucksack the size of an armchair on her back and wails that I don’t understand how hard she works. N gets most of his done under duress at school, which is bliss. But on the odd occasions when he's given something to do at home, all hell lets loose.

Now a leading US academic has created a furore by declaring that being piled with too much homework too young switches children off school.

The two sides of the homework divide are at loggerheads. Some parents say it reinforces work done at school and enables them to keep track of their children’s progress while others argue it's the final straw at the end of a long, tiring day.

I reckon that Miss Wright, L’s old primary school teacher in North Yorkshire, got it just about as right as her name. She sent five and six-year-olds home with a reading book every night and urged parents to hear their children read for ten minutes at least three times a week. Everything else was done in school time. She had a similarly realistic attitude towards SATs. Far from alarming her pupils about impending science, literacy and numeracy tests she didn’t make a big deal of them. She simply incorporated them into normal everyday lessons.

Looking back, L was lucky to have such a sensible teacher. She worked hard during school but had an even better time when the bell went at 3.30pm. Without stacks of homework to wade through, she had the energy to throw herself into ballet and tap lessons, the local Brownie pack and endless tea parties. In other words, she had fun!

L staggers off the bus at 5.15pm wearing an iPod headphone in one ear, scary black nail varnish and a jacket that’s definitely not on the school uniform list. It’s minus two degrees and like most 15-year-olds she’s NOT dressed for the freezing weather. She isn't bothered in the slightest though. The subject uppermost in her mind is the new TV series Skins, which she and her friends have been talking about for days.

Skins is the controversial and hugely-hyped new drama about a group of Bristol teenagers. It follows eight 17-year-olds as they get to grips with everything from sex and drugs to parties and annoying parents. The fact that the average age of the writers is 22 gives a pretty good idea of what to expect.

Except … we never got to watch it. L checked the programme times and shrieked in disgust. It turns out Skins is only on E4 – which we don’t get. Actually we don’t even get Five where we live so E4 is wildly exotic as far as we’re concerned.

But reading the reviews of Skins this morning I was relieved that L had missed out. The Times critic Ian Johns said the programme’s most shocking sight was Harry Enfield’s pot belly (eek!) while Patricia Wynn Davies commented crushingly in the Telegraph that “the trouble with hype is that it unrealistically raises expectations.”

As for L and me – we’ll have to wait for the DVD to discover what all the fuss is about.

Writer Conn Iggulden worries that parents are so terrified of letting boys be boys that we’re in danger of creating “a generation of frightened men.” The author of The Dangerous Book for Boys spent his childhood in deepest Middlesex constructing incendiary bombs, catapults and spud guns and reckons that 21^st Century boys should switch off their computers for a change and go and do something more adventurous.

At 12, N is in complete agreement with his hero’s sentiments. The only trouble is that he’s got a namby-pamby mum who won’t let him skateboard to school (four miles down a busy road and no pavement!) or climb the flimsy evergreen in the back garden.

Luckily for N he’s got a dad who’s even more of a dare-devil than he is. His dad is the man, after all, who was constructing homemade hang-gliders in the school attic at 13, glided into a thundercloud at 18 (not advisable) and now gets his kicks doing loop the loop over Oxfordshire in a pre-war plane.

Conn Iggulden would say he’s a great role model. I say he’s scary. He took L and N out on Saturday and they all had a whale of a time. I was thrilled – till I discovered the jaunt had been to a local airfield where he’d given them their first driving lesson up and down a bumpy, disused runway. It sends a shiver of terror down my spine just to think about it!

Isn’t it cheering when a scientific study endorses something you’ve suspected for ages?

I've always adored The Swish of the Curtain - but never realised I was in such exalted company before.

When I was little I couldn't get enough of Pamela Brown’s wonderful stories about seven stage-struck children who launch their own theatre company in a disused church hall. And after listening to a Radio Four documentary this morning it turns out that Victoria Wood, Maggie Smith, Jacqueline Wilson, Jenny Éclair and David Bellamy are huge fans too. Victoria Wood even called her production company Blue Door Adventures after the theatre in the book.

Pamela Brown was only 14 when she wrote the novel (I’m a very late starter) and typing it out on a battered old typewriter with two fingers took her a whole year!

When my daughter L asked me to write a book for her three years ago my mind immediately raced back to The Swish of the Curtain. What if, I thought, I tried to write an updated version – with five main characters instead of seven and set in an X-Factor-style pop competition rather than the theatre. The end-result, of course, turned out differently (novels have a habit of going their own way), but that was my starting point.

When I visit schools to talk about my children’s book, The Rise and Shine Saturday Show, classes often ask what inspired the book. But when I bring out my old battered copy of The Swish of the Curtain the year 5s and 6s mostly look blank and admit they’ve never heard of it. The teachers are a completely different story though. Most of them gaze in rhapsody at the book and murmur “oh yes, I loved that book…I must read it again…”

Forget wild parties and tuneless renditions of Auld Lang Syne at three a.m. My idea of the perfect New Year’s Eve is an evening at home, with a glass or two of ice-cold champagne, a delicious supper and a few rounds of Charades. At 15, L isn’t too impressed – she rolled her eyes and decamped to a friend’s party this year – but 12-year-old N was very happy with his Pepsi Max, chocolate fondue and Jools Holland on the telly at midnight.

My mum wasn’t a big fan of New Year either. Once we’d all grown up and left home she preferred to sit on her London terrace and enjoy the dazzling array of fireworks exploding across the night sky. She was completely appalled one year when a well-meaning temporary secretary knocked on the door out of the blue to keep her company.

No, when it comes to celebrating, Christmas knocks spots off New Year. This year we had a relaxed family Christmas in Dorset, with a delicious turkey cooked by my sister, gorgeous treats and bracing walks along the beach. L and N gave me my best present ever – a personal radio broadcast created by them. They spend most of the half-hour download ridiculing my taste in music (Lily Allen, Teddy Thompson, Morrissey - not cutting edge, I know) and nearly blast my eardrums to pieces by playing a song called Teenage Kicks at top volume. “I’m sorry to say this, but your music sucks,” says N at one point – but he makes up with the craziest rendition of Sergeant Pepper I’ve ever heard.

“This is our very first radio show,” announces L at the start of the broadcast. I’m hoping like mad they’ll do me another one next year…

“He’s laughing,” hissed L in a theatrical whisper.

“He’s tapping his feet.”

“He’s talking to the man next to him.”

L and N have never been ardent monarchists – I blame their republican dad – but they were utterly gripped by their first brush with royalty. The three of us had been looking forward to  Merry Wives – the Musical for weeks. I was keen to see the wonderful Judi Dench as Mistress Quickly while L and N wanted to know whether the RSC’s latest offering could possibly rival last year’s Great Expectations.

After battling up the motorway to Stratford through dense fog we plonked ourselves in row M and congratulated ourselves on arriving early for a change. L went to buy a programme and N mulled over what flavour of ice cream he’d like during the interval.

Suddenly the auditorium went deathly quiet as a man in a charcoal-grey suit hurried down the aisle with a small entourage at his heels. It was Prince Charles – sans Camilla, but with RSC director Gregory Doran and actor Antony Sher. The trio, deep in conversation, parked themselves two rows in front of us.

“What’s he doing here?” muttered N. “It’s a long way from his palace.”

Like many of N’s questions, this one was unanswerable. I have no idea why Prince Charles was there – but I hope he enjoyed the show as much as we did. It didn’t quite match up to Coram Boy (see last blog) but it was uproarious fun. Judi Dench was magnificent, Simon Callow (in a fat suit so revoltingly convincing that N thought he really weighed 20 stone) made us laugh out loud as Falstaff and Alistair McGowan showed that he’s wasted on primetime TV.

It was a great way to start Christmas. And on that note, I hope you all have a wonderful Christmas and a cracking New Year. See you in 2007…

Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a trip to the theatre. My mum always took us to the panto every year and I’ve carried on the tradition with L and N. Over the years we’ve seen everything from the RSC’s The Secret Garden (fantastic) to Matthew Kelly in Peter Pan (not so fantastic.)

Our choice this year was Coram Boy at the National. The play’s based on the Whitbread-prizewinning novel by Jamila Gavin and has had sensational reviews. Time Out declared that it’s “as moving and thrilling as one could ever hope to experience in the theatre” while the Sunday Telegraph called it “visually and emotionally stunning.” I know infanticide in 18^th Century England doesn’t sound the most festive theme around but theatre critics are a notoriously tough bunch to please and they all reckon Coram Boy is unmissable.

And it really was. By the time we emerged from the theatre three hours later we felt like we’d been whirled through an emotional wringer. We’d witnessed heart-stopping moments of cruelty and wickedness and uplifting scenes offering hope and redemption – all set against the exquisite backdrop of a 40-strong choir singing Handel’s Messiah.

“That’s the best play I’ve ever seen,” said N as we hurried along the mist-enshrouded South Bank. “We’ve got to see it again.”

I was stunned to discover that one in ten British nationals now lives abroad. Nearly 200,000 people moved to far-flung places last year and another million globetrotters look set to depart over the next five years.

A new report puts the mass exodus down to sunshine, a better quality of life, job opportunities or a desire to join family and friends abroad. As my madcap purchase of a tumbledown farmhouse in the south of France draws scarily close, I’ve spent the last half-hour trying to work out what on earth possessed me to do something so rash. We’re only planning to spend the holidays there at the moment but here are the top five reasons I came up with:

1. It’s an adventure. When my dynamic, wonderful mum died suddenly two years ago the one comfort was that she’d packed as much into her life as she possibly could. I'm trying to do the same.
2. Every time I panic about the roof that’s fallen in or the trail of old bangers scattered across the garden I picture us having breakfast under the plane tree. Croissants from the boulangerie up the road, sun streaming through the windows and L riding elegantly up the drive on a powder-blue Vespa.
3. The journey through France is a good ten-hour drive and some pals say I'd be better off buying a bolthole in Brittany or Normandy. But my friend Jane, who’s lived in the Drome for 35 years, talks about the amazing places on our doorstep. You can head to the Mediterranean for the day or be on the ski slopes inside an hour. Amazing.
4. L and N have both promised they’ll be fluent in French by this time next year.
5. Last but not least, everyone thinks I’m going to back out at the eleventh hour. So I’ve got to show them I’m not a wimp. Vive la France!

The Tour de Trigs turned out to be even worse than A feared. Fifty mph winds, lashing rain and fields so boggy that the team could barely lift their boots out of the mud.

As usual the trio began the big day in high spirits, with a slap-up breakfast and a quick kit-check. Head torches, bandages, blister plasters and hearty picnics were flung into rucksacks amid jokes about the madness of embarking on a gruelling 50-mile walk through Oxfordshire for the fourth year running.

They set off at their allotted time of 11.27am with the mission of completing the challenge within 24 hours. Apparently it was fine till nightfall – and then the rot set in. Alan, the team leader, trudged on manfully but had to admit at 3am that he felt so sick he'd have to quit. A reached a low point soon after but struggled on through the wind and rain, unable to speak or map-read. He got in such a muddle at one point that the team went up and down the same hill three times.

At lunchtime on Sunday a weary A stumbled up the front path in a confused state. His face was bright red, pummelled for hours on end by the elements, he was covered in mud from head to toe and he’d taken his boots off because the blisters on his feet were so red-raw.

As he staggered through the front door, dropping his rucksack, fluorescent armbands and great clods of earth everywhere, there was just one thing on his mind.

“I’m never doing it again,” he spluttered. “Never. Ever. Do you hear me?”

A bolt of lightning streaked overhead as L and I crept out of the house at dawn on Saturday morning. The sky was black and the storm torrential but we’d planned to visit the Royal College of Art’s Secret 2006 exhibition and we refused to be deterred by a spot of rain.

RCA Secret was launched back in 1994 and is now an annual event. Each year hundreds of artists, from penniless students to Damien Hirst himself, are invited to create a one-off work of art on a postcard. The public can then buy one of the 2,500 cards on display for £35. The catch is that you don’t know who painted your card till you’ve handed over your money. Over the years the exhibition has raised a magnificent £650,000 for the RCA Fine Art Student Award Fund.

When we arrived at Kensington Gore at 10.30am we were stunned to see a queue worthy of the X-Factor. It snaked past the Royal Albert Hall (there were a few queuers there too!), past the Imperial College Union and round the corner. L looked as if she wanted to turn round and run back to Topshop but we gritted our teeth and decided to brave the wind and the rain.

It took us three and a half hours to get to the front of the queue. By the time we got inside we were drenched, freezing cold, bedraggled and desperate for a decent cup of coffee. But we’d also made a host of new best friends. The man in front of us was an RCA student who had three cards in the exhibition (all sold, much to his delight.) He disappeared to his studio at one point to bring me back a cup of tea. A couple from Huddersfield shared our umbrella and a woman behind us said her husband had started queuing at 11am the previous day (yes, really) and managed to buy four cards. “He was eighth in the queue,” she told us. “But he didn’t get much sleep.” Now there's a surprise.

I’d made a list of 12 postcards I liked (you can visit the exhibition the week before or look at them on the RCA website – www.rca.ac.uk.) Only one of them remained by the time we set foot inside the saleroom and the tension was palpable. Electronic boards flashed up the numbers of the cards – green for available, red for sold. Phew – as we stepped forward to the bank of cashiers it was still there.

“Number 2409,” I said firmly. As I uttered the words L tugged my sleeve. “Look,” she whispered. “It’s just gone.” And sure enough 2409 had turned from green to red before our very eyes.

So near and yet so far. The couple from Huddersfield, who managed to buy one card, commiserated and gave us huge bearhugs.

“At least we know how it’s done now,” they said. “We’ll be really organised next time – get here early and bring warm clothes, blankets and lots of food. See you next year?”

“See you next year,” L and I chorused as we departed empty-handed.

The death of The World at One presenter Nick Clarke came as a huge shock. Just a few months ago he and his wife Barbara made an amazingly brave audio diary chronicling his fight against cancer and everyone listening prayed he'd win through.

Like thousands of Radio Four listeners I gave a silent cheer when I switched on the radio one Friday night in the summer to hear Nick presenting Any Questions as smoothly and eloquently as ever. But his apparent recovery wasn’t to be. Only two days ago a friend remarked how she hadn’t heard him on the radio recently and wondered if everything was all right. I switched on The World at One yesterday lunchtime to hear the devastating news that no, it wasn’t.

The World at One was extended to an hour in tribute to Nick and everyone from Matthew Parris to Jack Straw came on to talk about Nick’s brilliance as an interviewer. Presenter Sean Ley held the programme together like a true professional but every now and again his voice quavered just a fraction. Listening at home, you could hear the sorrow and sadness pervading the studio.

I hope that one day his family, Barbara, their four-year-old twin sons and Nick’s three children by his first marriage, will listen to that broadcast. More than 300 emails poured in during the programme – testimony to the passing of an outstanding journalist and a brave man.

The back gate crashes open and a bedraggled figure clad in muddy walking boots and clutching an Ordnance Survey map is standing there. It’s A, back from a training session for the trickiest challenge of the year. His usual hobbies - marathons, aerobatics, gliding etc – are crazy enough but they pale into insignificance compared to the Tour de Trigs walking competition.

Before we moved to Oxfordshire, I’d never heard of the Tour de Trigs. It’s billed as the toughest non-stop cross-country navigation exercise in the area but that’s not the half of it. The event happens every December and attracts walkers from all over the world. It involves trudging 50 miles in 24 hours, much of it in darkness, freezing conditions and across boggy fields. Competitors enter in teams of three and are handed a set of grid references half an hour before the start – so it’s a test of grit, stamina and map-reading ability. Sheer bloody-mindedness too, if you ask me.

This year will be the fourth time A’s taken part – and he’s already wondering why he agreed to do it again. The first time he collapsed in a shattered heap after about 40 miles and didn’t finish. He hobbled upstairs when he got home and didn’t emerge for two days. The second year he managed to complete the walk but his lovely team-leader didn’t so they decided to try again. The trio all made it to the finishing line last year and I assumed that would be the end of it. But they got chatting a few weeks ago and, I still can’t believe this, decided to give the Trigs another go.

So if you live in Oxfordshire, Warwickshire or Northamptonshire and spot a weary threesome staggering past your house at three in the morning with rucksacks on their backs and mud up to their knees, don’t assume it’s burglars on the warpath. The chances are that it’ll be A and his pals…

The phone rings and it’s friends from London who’ve heard about the impending French house purchase. They bought a house in the south of France several years back and the last time I saw them was in Dieulefit in August. They were having a leisurely breakfast at a café with their daughters when I whizzed past clutching a sheaf of estate agents’ particulars.

At that stage I hadn’t admitted to anyone, least of all myself, that I might buy a bolthole in France. Now I’d been caught red-handed. I started burbling that it would be good to get my eye in and that it probably wouldn’t ever happen... and I think they marked me down as one of the many English visitors who dawdle dreamily outside estate agents’ windows every summer but never sign on the dotted line.

“We didn’t think you were serious,” said B last night. “Nor did I,” I replied. “But I seem to have been swept along by events.”

Those events are now moving at breakneck speed. The notaire is on the phone every other day and the “geometre,” the person who measures out the land and checks that every hectare (all one and a half of them) is present and correct, is pitching up at the end of the month. I’m listening to Peter Mayle CDs to spur myself on and even dragged L to see A Good Year in Oxford on Sunday night. The film’s been universally panned by the critics but I loved it. Not for the script or the acting – or indeed Russell Crowe, who is woefully miscast as a whizzkid City trader who chucks in his job to run a vineyard in Provence. But for the endless shots of sunlit fields of lavender, the pretty village squares and that amazing mauve-tinted light that’s so typical of that part of France. There’s no doubt about it. I’m definitely going soft in the head…

Researchers reckon they’ve come up with a nit-buster to get rid of head lice once and for all.

But after spending a small fortune over the years on combs, lotions and a curious electronic device that’s supposed to zap the blasted creepy-crawlies, I’m downright sceptical.

I’ve spent hours smothering L and N’s heads with different oils and conditioners and even longer combing their hair through. You only have to miss one tiny egg and the nits are back with a vengeance a few days later.

It wasn’t so bad with N because his hair is short and blond and mid-brown nits can run but they can’t hide. L, however, is a different story. She never gets nits now (funny how they’re so prevalent at primary school but pretty rare at secondary school) but when she did it was a nightmare - mainly because the nits were the same colour as her hair. Great camouflage!

So even though I hope my nit-combing days are over (fingers crossed) I’m not convinced by the new Lousebuster. The US inventor reckons his machine will be installed in schools but at £1,000 a time I don’t think schools will be queuing up. And nor will the hard-pressed teachers who’ll no doubt have to supervise...

This Life was the cult TV series about a group of racey 20-something lawyers who shared a house in Southwark back in the 90s.

Now it's coming back for a brand-new one-off episode - and I can't wait. I’m not an avid TV-watcher but I was completely gripped by the turbulent lives of Miles, Milly, Warren, Egg and the wonderful Anna (and her terrible leopard-print coat.) I didn’t miss a single episode of it – and there were 32 altogether. Lots of the actors – like Jack Davenport, Andrew Lincoln and Daniela Nardini – have gone on to starrier things now but when they first appeared in the show they were virtually unknown.

This Life + 10 is due for broadcast in December and in the lead-up to the big event BBC2 is screening the first two series in their entirety.

What a treat…

I’m having sleepless nights about the wreck of a house I seem to have bought in France.

On one hand I keep thinking about the fun we’re going to have there. The hearty walks in the Alps, the morning stroll to the boulangerie for fresh croissants and pains au chocolat and the drinks under the plane tree where generations of farmers have put the world to rights over a glass or two of Pastis.

But on the other I'm worrying about a multitude of things. Why did no one else want to buy the place? Will we ever manage to renovate it? What happens if L and N get bored of the French country air?

I’ve changed my mind so many times that L and N roll their eyes whenever I mention the subject. L is already planning what colour she wants to paint her bedroom (a roof might be a good idea first) and N is drawing up designs for a tree-house. The moment I start dithering again L scrolls through my computer screen till she finds the most breathtaking view of the Alps she can find. Then she makes me stare at it till I’m back on track.

But as of today I won’t be able to procrastinate any longer. The five per cent deposit was due at noon and I’ve just had an email from the currency exchange company .

“The onward transfer for this contract has been completed,” it says in an alarmingly matter-of-fact sort of way. My heart starts beating wildly. I think I'll have to go and lie down…

Buying a house in France is a steep learning curve. I may be an intrepid serial mover on this side of the Channel but in France I’m a complete novice. Barely safe to be let out alone in fact.

Once I’d decided to buy the house – or A, L and N had decided for me - I was told to pitch up at the vendors’ lawyers at 12 noon sharp on Monday. Inside the small ground-floor office in the middle of sleepy Puy St Martin the world and his wife were waiting for me. Two lawyers, the three brothers who are selling the house, the farmer who rents their land and the estate agent. The office was so crowded that I half-expected the village mayor to walk in to witness the proceedings. L and N took one look at the melee and bolted straight back to the car.

The brothers’ lawyer then proceeded to read through pages and pages of the closely-typed contract. I'd be hard-pressed to understand most of it in English, let alone French. We skittered through a tricky moment when the brothers tried to keep shared ownership of the drive to the house but remembering my mum’s horror of sharing a drive I kept my nerve. They finally agreed it went with the property and the papers were carefully amended.

At the end of the meeting the brothers shook everyone by the hand and departed by car and scooter back to their farm. Their mackintosh-clad lawyer strode off purposefully, carrying his lunchtime baguette under his arm like a police truncheon.

I was so shattered by the experience that I could have slept for a week but some friends who took the French-house buying plunge back in July had kindly invited us to lunch.

“Wonderful news. Wonderful,” said Oliver as he poured us all a celebratory glass of Clairette de Die, the region’s delicious sparkling white wine.

And even though I was terrified senseless at what I had just done, I had to agree.

Warning: Reading accounts of adventurous new lives across the Channel can seriously damage your judgment.

The rot set in when I talked to friends who’ve sold up in Cumbria and moved lock, stock and barrel to a glorious house halfway up a French hillside. Next I became transfixed by Matthew Parris’s A Castle in Spain, the story of his spur of the moment decision six years ago to buy a ruined castle in the wilds of Catalonia (he calls it "one of those foolish challenges that grip us in middle life.") Then I devoured C’est La Folie, Michael Wright’s wonderful tale of how he bade farewell to his safe Dulwich life and moved to a French farm near Limoges with only a cat, a piano and an aeroplane for company.

So now I’ve gone completely off my trolley and joined them. Well, not literally – and only for holidays, not for keeps. On Monday morning, with L and N egging me on like mad, I took my first shaky steps towards buying a complete wreck of a house in the south of France. Part of the roof has fallen in, the garden’s littered with cars and old scrap and the entire place needs, as my friend Jane puts it, “bringing back to life.” That’s not the half of it – but I’ve still gone and signed the compromis de vente.

There’s only one word for it. Help!

The weather is dire, the street outside is littered with rubbish from the town’s annual Michaelmas Fair and someone torched a car a couple of streets away last night. N was just putting his bike away at 8pm when he spotted the flames soaring into the night sky. Luckily, the police were on the scene in minutes.

But when I checked my emails this morning I was transported to the other side of the world. Lin and Mo, our lovely fifty-something ex-neighbours from number nine, have started their gap year for grown-ups and are clearly having a whale of a time in Australia.

 “We have been in Oz for two months now - can you believe it?” they wrote. “Having such a wonderful experience - got a Greyhound bus pass back in North Queensland and only just arrived in Sydney. The size of the country is awesome - you could fit 12 UKs into Queensland alone!! We have formed some good friendships along the way and stayed in some amazing places. Last week we stayed in an olive grove among all the vineyards in the Hunter Valley and today we have just finished breakfast overlooking the northern reaches of Sydney Harbour!”

I wonder if they’d mind if I tagged along for a while?

Everywhere I step at the moment I trip over wires, batteries and rubber wheels. The sink is clogged up with mud and the scruffy bit of gravel where I park the car is full of miniature speed ramps.

The assorted debris is all down to 12-year-old N’s latest passion in life. We’ve been through cycling, rowing and skateboarding – now remote control cars are his number one thing. He wakes up talking about motor mechanics, pores over trade magazines at breakfast and spends every spare minute tinkering with his precious car.

Our garden is tiny but the chap at the local remote control car shop suggested N could race the car on the playing fields of a local secondary school at weekends. He told him there was acres of space and the school didn’t mind at all.

Sure enough, we pitched up there on Saturday morning and N switched on the remote. The car went off like a rocket, doing jumps and wheelies up and down the grass. “Awesome,” sighed N over and over again.

Suddenly an agitated-looking middle-aged man rushed across the field to us.

‘What do you think you are doing?” he demanded of N. “We’re in the middle of a teachers’ meeting and we can’t hear ourselves speak because of THAT THING. What year are you in – you’re getting a detention.”

At which point N had to admit he didn’t go to the school – and like cowards, we both scarpered.

Like most teenagers, L is a techno whizz-kid. My lovely 14-year-old only has to glance at a digital camera, DVD player or BlackBerry and she instantly knows how to work it. I’m ashamed to say that when my laptop crashes I sometimes text her at school for advice. Not good parenting.

My lack of technical competence is most obvious in restaurants when I get presented with that irritating PIN machine at the end of lunch. I either tip the waiter £500 instead of £5 or type my PIN number in instead of the amount due. I wish I was joking but I’m afraid I’m not.

But a Press Gazette piece about Daily Mail columnist Peter McKay made me laugh about my ineptitude. When waiters hand the PIN machine to him he picks it up and presses it to his ear like a mobile. Then he cups his hand over the machine and whispers to his lunch companion “It’s the office,” before yelling into it “I’ll be back in a jiffy.”

I’m tempted to try it myself. The trouble is that I already embarrass L and N so much I don’t dare.

It’s two years since Liam Mower won a £28,000-a-year scholarship to London’s prestigious Royal Ballet School.

Soon afterwards the young son of a Hull pipe fitter was offered a starring role in the hit West End musical Billy Elliot, one of three boys to share the part of the miner's son who dreams of being a ballet dancer. His performance on the opening night was so exquisite that one critic predicted he’d be “the biggest child star since Mark Lester played Oliver Twist.”

Maybe - but now 14-year-old Liam has chucked in his scholarship and returned to the north east. He’s homesick and says the pressure of performing onstage two or three times a week, attending dancing lessons and keeping up with his schoolwork is too great. He’s heading back to his Hull comprehensive to do his GCSEs and says he can’t wait to be “a boy again for a bit.”

“Being a boy again” sounds a great idea. I hope he has the time of his life kicking a ball around with his pals, skateboarding at the park and watching The Simpsons on TV every night. Stardom can wait when you’re only 14. And I bet his mum’s made up to have him home!

.

The news that Jeremy Paxman, once an arch-republican, has written a book about the monarchy got me thinking back to my own brief sojourn as a royal reporter. Jeremy’s in hot water, incidentally, for claiming that Prince Charles is so fussy about his boiled eggs that the royal chefs serve up several – just to make sure one is cooked to perfection.

Not true, says Clarence House sniffily, although it seems perfectly plausible when you remember that Charles’s valet squeezes his toothpaste on to his toothbrush for him every morning.

I spent a couple of years following the royals for the Evening Standard back in the 80s. Princess Diana was splashed across the tabloid front pages virtually every day – for dancing onstage with Wayne Sleep as a birthday surprise for Charles, dressing up as a policewoman for Fergie’s hen night and taking William to his Notting Hill nursery school for the first time.

My most vivid memories are from Charles and Diana’s Middle East tour of 1986. As the royal couple progressed through Oman, Qatar, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia, they both looked utterly miserable. But at that stage even seasoned royal-watchers didn’t realise the rot had set in. Most of us simply assumed the tour was too long and gruelling, that Diana was missing her sons and that once you’ve seen one falconry display in the desert you’ve probably seen them all.

Biba’s back – but it just isn’t the same.

When I was 12 no trip to London was ever complete without a trip to the most amazing shop in London. Stepping inside Biba was like being transported into an Aladdin’s cave full of sludgy-coloured T-shirts, suede over-the-knee boots, little cloche hats and pots of eye shadow stamped with Barbara Hulanicki’s swirly gold logo.

Biba closed in 1975 but 30 years later the label’s been revived, with designer Bella Freud at the helm. L took one look at the pictures of Biba mini dresses and platform shoes in Grazia and swooned with delight. But to me they look like a pale imitation of 1970s-Biba.

Oh dear. I’m worried that nothing seems as good as it used to be. When I was a teenager my favourite book was Lynne Reid Banks’ The L-Shaped Room. I read the story of single mum Jane Graham over and over again - but when I picked it up recently it seemed plain annoying and hopelessly dated.

I used to adore the pretty North Devon fishing village of Clovelly – yet when I took L and N there it was too touristy by half. And when I tracked down a CD by Claire Hamill, my favourite singer when I was at school, N got the giggles after only a few bars of Sidney Gorgeous, my number one track.

“I can’t believe you ever liked that!” he said crushingly. Then he switched it off with a flourish and put the Arctic Monkeys on.

“She can do anything, can’t she?” said an admiring voice behind us as we filed out of a sensational performance at Stratford upon Avon’s Swan Theatre last week.

The woman was talking about Tamsin Greig, star of the RSC’s much-acclaimed (and sell-out) production of Much Ado About Nothing – and I couldn’t agree more. Tamsin plays the feisty Beatrice in diva style – with dark glasses, pencil skirts and plenty of attitude. The play's been set in 1950s Cuba, complete with Havana cigars, samba dancing and rifle-toting revolutionaries, and Tamsin and co-star Joseph Millson (remember him from Peak Practice?) are brilliant.

I’ve always found Tamsin profoundly irritating in the past. I can’t stand whingey Debbie Aldridge, the role she’s played in The Archers for 15 years, and as for Alice, the single woman looking for love in Love Soup – just too annoying for words.

But even L and N were bowled over. Admittedly they weren’t that impressed when I announced we were going to a Shakespeare play the minute they set foot out of school but they came round a bit with the promise of a picnic supper as we drove up the motorway and Cokes all round during the interval. And as the evening progressed and Beactrice and Benedick’s antics reduced them to fits of giggles they realised they were witnessing something special.

The production’s about to transfer to London and it’s unmissable. Get those tickets booked now!

“I agree,” said N through a mouthful of Shreddies this morning as he pored over the front page of the Daily Telegraph.

Twelve-year-old N’s usually a tabloid boy through and through so I was stunned to find him reading a broadsheet for a change (the pair of us fight for the red tops over breakfast before he goes to school.) But the headline that had caught his eye was a report claiming that junk culture – fast food, computer games and the like – is irrevocably damaging our children.

N’s not averse to the odd fizzy drink and Xbox session himself so it was startling to hear him agreeing with the distinguished band of teachers, psychologists and writers who’d written to the Telegraph to express their concern.

But on reflection I realised that N’s at his happiest whizzing around on his bike, building speed ramps for his skateboard and somersaulting on the trampoline. He thrives on lots of fresh air, exercise and wholesome food (admittedly with the odd Fanta Fruit Twist thrown in.)

What doesn’t go down well is pressure, being nagged about his homework or being cooped up indoors for hours on end.

Media studies are getting it in the neck again. More students than ever are taking the subject at A level – but Cambridge University has branded the subject an academic lightweight, John Humphrys reckons it’s pointless and former chief inspector of schools Chris Woodhead says it's “vacuous.”

The issue divides teachers and journalists alike. Some express doubt over whether it constitutes a sufficiently rigorous and coherent course while others declare the chances of it leading to a job in the media are remote in the extreme.

Ardent supporters argue that in our media-dominated society, it’s only right and proper – indeed essential – that youngsters learn about the complexities of TV, films, advertising and the press.

I can talk with a bit of authority because I’ve actually taught the subject. When I went mad a few years back and decided to try teaching (I lasted precisely six months) I taught media studies – A level and HND – at my local further education college.

Like a fool I assumed that most of my students wanted to be journalists.

How wrong could I be? Most of my lot were desperate to be Quentin Tarantino. They were up to speed with Big Brother and EastEnders but they didn’t read newspapers or take any interest in current affairs. When I asked them to bring in a piece of journalism they admired the majority grabbed a copy of the weekly freesheet on the walk up to college.

The trouble with media studies is that it’s too broad by half. It ranges from reality TV to advertising, taking in film, marketing and print journalism along the way. I know lots of journalists and none of them read media studies. If you want to be a journalist it’s far better to enrol on a dedicated print or broadcasting training scheme (easier said than done I know) and learn on the job.

Marc Levy is France’s best-selling novelist. Steven Spielberg shelled out $2 million to make his first book into a movie and his last five novels have sold an eye-watering 10 million copies.

I’d never even heard of the man till two weeks ago when I spotted his books plastered all over the Lyon branch of FNAC, the brilliant French book store. Back in the UK this weekend, I opened the Sunday Times to see a glowing profile of Levy – who, it turns out, lives in London and waxes lyrical about everything from wonderful English baguettes (weird) and charming locals to the glorious British climate(!) He admits BT is a mess and the NHS isn’t up to much but apart from that he’s smitten.

I’ve got the opposite problem. When I lived in France a few years back I was desperately homesick. I missed my mum, couldn’t bear not being able to buy British newspapers and worried that my daughter couldn’t communicate with her school pals.

Ten years on, everything has changed. I’ve fallen in love with the Drome, a little-known region sandwiched between the Rhône Valley and the foothills of the Alps. The countryside is lush and green, with majestic crags that tower over the landscape – a bit like Provence crossed with the Lake District.

We were only there for two weeks but I was transfixed. N was so taken with the climate, culture and kindness of everyone we met in Dieulefit that he pleaded to move there on the spot. L is an Oxford girl through and through but even she conceded she’d quite like to spend the summer months there. As for me, I’ve registered with an estate agent and asked our friend Jane, who moved to the Drome 35 years ago, to keep a look-out.

Watch this space!

With the school holidays two-thirds of the way through, the house is rapidly descending into chaos. I’ve got two children twiddling their thumbs while I try to get my last few commissions out of the way and a massive pile of books in the basement to sell.

Things got even more manic this morning when I sat down at my desk to interview a headteacher on the phone about the stresses and strains of her job. Upstairs, directly overhead, L was in her room playing The Red Hot Chili Peppers at top volume, while outside in the garden N’s remote controlled car sounded distinctly like a pneumatic drill.

I tried to concentrate hard on what the head was saying. She was incredibly inspiring, telling me that the great thing about teaching is that no two days are ever the same. “It’s a bit like a roller coaster,” she said. “Some days, like results days and the year 11 prom, are wonderful, while others are completely miserable. But it’s varied, interesting and seeing the children you met in year 7 leave as adults at 17 or 18 is fantastic.”

Scribbling furiously away in shorthand, I barely had time to pause for breath.  When I did, I did a double-take. Two figures in paint overalls were framed outside my office window. That’s the other thing – while all this is going on I’ve gone completely off my trolley and arranged for the outside of the house to be painted. I can’t move for scaffolders, painters, ladders and pots of white Dulux paint.

Tomorrow morning promises to be just as mad. A reporter from the local radio station is arriving at 6.55am to have breakfast with us and talk about The Rise and Shine Saturday Show live on air. “We just want to feature you all having a nice normal breakfast,” she told me when she rang to fix it.

The trouble is that I have no idea what “normal” is any more.

Da-da-di-da. The Rise and Shine Saturday Show has officially been published and is selling like hot cakes, I’m glad to say.

I panicked slightly when a consignment of 2,000 copies arrived from the printers. The middle-aged courier staggered down our wonky basement steps and stacked them in a daunting pile by the back door. “I usually deliver to publishers' warehouses,” he said witheringly. “Then every so often I get one of these.”

The mountain of books looked so huge that it certainly got me cracking. I was immediately on the phone to wholesalers, booksellers and journalists, offering my sales pitch at break-neck speed. L and N switched off the Xbox and pitched in, trotting endlessly back and forth to the post office with parcels of books. L designed an ultra-professional despatch note and they both proof-read my press releases.

Catherine Jones, a fellow novelist and great friend, has already read the book and has been ultra-kind about it. When she popped in for a cup of tea, she took one look at the pile, blanched slightly and vowed to do whatever she could. She was as good as her word, firing an email off to everyone in her contacts book the minute she got home.

“Emma has just self-published a fantastic kids’ book called The Rise and Shine Saturday Show,” she wrote. “I have read it and it is truly terrific and very topical.  Maybe some of you with kids could order it from your local shops and libraries.”

Catherine is no slouch in the writing and self-publishing stakes herself. In 1990 she self-published a guide to being an Army officer’s wife called Gumboots and Pearls and sold 16,000 copies. Over the months I’ve emailed her constantly to ask for advice about everything from barcodes to wholesalers and she’s been brilliant..

You need friends like Catherine when you launch a new publishing house.

L’s returned safely from her trek across the Atlas Mountains – and I’m so relieved to have her back. My lovely 14-year-old daughter now boasts a hennaed tattoo across her back (she swears it’ll only last a month), a new liking for tangine and couscous (she used to be reluctant to try anything new in the food stakes) and a string of marriage proposals from Moroccan youths. “What did you say?” asked her astounded younger brother. L shot him a withering look. “I said ‘no’ of course,” she said.

L was away for two weeks precisely and it felt like a lifetime. I slept with my mobile under my pillow, checked my emails assiduously and worried like mad night and day. When she rang from a Berber village two days into the trip and said she felt ill I wanted to fly out that second and bring her straight back home.

But that early wobble was the only low point. She climbed to the top of Mount Toubkal, the highest mountain in North Africa, learned to barter in the souks and became an old hand at purifying her drinking water with iodine. She can now say “hello" and "thank you” in Berber, is unfazed by cockroaches and beetles, knows how to pitch a tent on a mountainside and can recite the Christian names of David Beckham’s three sons. For some reason, the young Moroccans L met were obsessed with Posh and Becks and quizzed L and her friends about them.

As an over-anxious mum, I’d told L before she went to make sure she drank enough water, wore a sunhat and stayed with her schoolfriends at all times – and sure enough she did. The one thing I never thought to mention was to look after her hair and brush it out at night. As a result she has dreadlocks Bob Marley would be proud of and neither of us know what to do. If anyone’s got any suggestions, they’d be gratefully received…

My son N was 12 yesterday so we celebrated with a trip to London to see Andrew Lloyd Webber’s The Phantom of the Opera. It was a sweltering night but Her Majesty’s Theatre in Haymarket was packed to the gunnels and the show was truly stunning.

The Phantom, powerfully played by Earl Carpenter, terrified the living daylights of me but N is made of sterner stuff. Our seats were in the Grand Circle, miles from the stage, so N insisted on paying 50p for a pair of opera glasses to study the Phantom’s scar-ravaged face in detail. “Not scary at all,” was his verdict.

Before setting off we’d had a minor row over what N should wear to the show. I reckoned mud-spattered Bermuda shorts and a hoodie was “not a good look” for a posh night out but N was having none of it. “I don’t have to wear a Mieow Mieow tuxedo just because we’re going to the theatre,” he raged. N doesn’t often stop me in my tracks but I was confused for a few seconds. Mieow Mieow tuxedo? What on earth was he on about? Then it dawned on me. He meant Miu Miu – Prada’s ultra-chic sister label.

I was so impressed that my skateboard-obsessed, muddy-kneed son had heard of Miu Miu that I capitulated instantly. And in fact shorts and hoodies turned out to be the order of the evening. The days when theatre-goers glammed up to the nines are long gone - and that's absolutely fine by N.

My teenage daughter L’s in the middle of Morocco on her school trek and like all mums I keep worrying about how she’s getting on. I'm hoping she’s slapping on sun-cream, eating properly and drinking enough water in the scorching heat. Suddenly, as if by magic, an email pops into my inbox and it’s from L. She’s sitting in an internet café in Marrakech prior to setting off for the Atlas Mountains tomorrow and sounds on top of the world.

“I’m having an amazing time,” she writes. “We visited a Berber village and played football. The people were really friendly and interesting to talk to.”

I immediately forward the email to my sister and my dad and for the millionth time wish I could send it to my mum too. Twenty months after her death it still seems unbelievable she isn’t here. We spoke on the phone every day and there’s still so much I want to say. I’d love to tell her about that first Christmas when N raised his glass and made a toast “to the woman who made all our dreams come true” and how L designed a T-shirt with her smiling face on the front when A ran the London marathon in her memory.

The one comforting thing is that I know in my heart she’d be so proud of L right now – proud of her grit and determination thousands of miles from home. And somehow that helps a lot.

You know a book is special when you can’t stop talking about it. You make your book club read it, listen to the audio tape and buy copies for all your family and friends.

That’s how I felt about How I Live Now, by Meg Rosoff. The story of a 15-year-old New Yorker called Daisy who arrives in England to stay with her beguiling cousins and then finds herself caught up in a terrifying war that changes all their lives, it’s tender, wise and beautifully written – and richly deserved the 2004 Guardian Children’s Fiction Prize. If you haven’t read it yet, I can’t praise it highly enough.

This week – hurrah – Rosoff’s second novel is out and early reviews say she’s produced another triumph. Just in Case is about a 15-year-old boy this time – an edgy teenager called Justin who’s adopted by an 18-year-old woman photographer with a crazy dress sense.

I’ve already ordered my copy from Amazon and can’t wait to get my hands on it. But I’m hopeless at waiting for treats and if I spot it in a bookshop first I know I’ll succumb to temptation and buy it.

I can’t be the only parent tearing their hair out in rage at an infuriating piece by writer Helen Kirwan-Taylor in the Daily Mail today.

The article is entitled ”Sorry, but my children bore me to death!” and details how Helen sends her nanny to children’s birthday parties in her place (she’s far too busy shopping at Harvey Nichols and having her highlights done), avoids watching their sports matches and knows next-to-nothing about their school lives.

“Frankly, as long as you’ve fed them, sheltered them and told them they are loved, children will be fine,” she says. “Mine are – at the risk of sounding smug – well-adjusted, creative children who respect the concept of work. They also accept my limitations.”

At first I thought the whole thing was a wind-up but she appears to be deadly serious. She also seems to miss the point that it’s actually fun spending time with your children. L and N make me laugh more than anyone I know, keep me up to date with everything from music (L is very disapproving of my liking for Lily Allen) to clothes and are full of suggestions for jaunts. L’s currently on her two-week school trek across the Atlas Mountains and we're missing her desperately so N’s suggested a trip to the new movie Stormbreaker to cheer us up.

Helen definitely ought to read Libby Purves’ deeply moving column about family holidays in The Times yesterday. Libby, whose 23-year-old son Nicholas was found hanged at home last month after a long battle with depression, wrote: "We continue as a smaller unit and part of a wider tribe, but a phase of our history is over. And while routine memories are all very well, the ones that sustain us best through the darkness are the dozens of journeys, expeditions, skives, weekends, ferries, trains, planes, boats and adventures we somehow fitted in."

My finger hovered over the send button for several seconds before I hit it with a flourish. Suddenly, three years after I first started writing my children’s book, The Rise and Shine Saturday Show, it had whizzed through the ether and out of my control. The final PDF,  typeset in Bembo and looking gorgeous, was on its way to the printers in Reading.

I’ve been poring over the typeset manuscript for weeks and by the end of it I could barely see the wood for the trees. Should there be a gap between on and stage, when was the heroine’s mother’s birthday, how do you spell Christina Aguilera? I woke up at night terrified that I’d made a horrendous mistake and at dawn would start rifling through the manuscript all over again.

When the final version arrived on my laptop this morning I drove the typesetter mad by asking whether a full stop on the penultimate page could be changed to a comma.

“Is that the last change?” he asked.

“I’m going to have to draw a line under it somewhere, aren’t I?” I said.

“Yes, you are.”

“OK – no more changes.”

“So it’s a wrap?”

“It’s a wrap,” I agreed, feeling like I'd just packed my child off to boarding school.

In less than two weeks the printers will deliver 2,000 copies of the book to my house (where on earth am I going to put them?) and hopefully the orders will come flooding in.

Our lovely neighbours Lin and Mo have sold Number 9 and departed for their gap year. They came round for a farewell drink and by this time next week they’ll be en route to Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand for eight months.

They’ve packed up all their belongings, jettisoned everything they don’t need and planned their trip like a military campaign. They’re travelling with the bare minimum in their rucksacks and if there’s anything they need along the way they’ll either buy it or do without.

Since I last wrote about Lin and Mo, gap years for grown-ups seem to have become the in thing. Elizabeth Diggory, the outgoing head of St Paul’s Girls School, says she’s off on a road trip across the US for hers, while a teacher friend recently arrived back from a year’s voluntary work in Africa.

Lin and Mo have promised to send emails and keep us updated about their adventures but it just won’t be the same as having them next door. As we said goodbye with huge hugs and a few tears, Mo pointed out that our new neighbours have teenage children who are similar ages to L and N and play the electric guitar. She insisted we won’t miss them at all – but she's wrong.

Bon voyage!

Looking very chic and confident in wetsuits and board shorts, L and N headed off to Poole Harbour this morning to start a week’s sailing course. At their age my sister and I sailed sweet little eight-foot dinghies. One was called PC Plod, the other Bust-It (not the most elegant names but clad in huge yellow oilskins and matching souwesters we weren’t elegant sailors.)

We terrified ourselves witless one afternoon when we heard a deafening foghorn and swung round to clock a massive oil tanker chugging straight at us. We swiftly turned about, narrowly avoided capsize and headed back to port. Neither of us ventured out to sea again for years.

The drama made me determined that my two were going to learn the ropes properly - everything from how to tie a reef knot to sailing with a spinnaker. They’ve sailed every summer for four years now and they’re getting pretty good. I yearn for Swallows and Amazons trips up river, with picnics, swimming and L and N at the helm – but they have their sights set on Ellen MacArthur. They crave speed, excitement and crossing the ocean wave. N is probably the only person in the UK right now who goes to bed at night hoping for 100mph winds and storms lashing the harbour wall to gee things up a bit!

I used to dread school reports. When my sister’s and mine arrived in the post, my dad would disappear into his study and shut the door, leaving us to pace up and down anxiously till he emerged.

But my two are pretty relaxed about what their teachers say. Probably too relaxed. L broke up for the summer holidays today (hooray) and while I usually have to yell at her to get out of bed at 6.45am to stand a hope in hell of catching the bus, this morning she was up at dawn sorting out her outfit and washing her hair. It was a non-uniform day so she and her friends had been planning what to wear for weeks. L’s choice was a black mini-skirt and green Ramones T-shirt belonging to N. Her impending school report was the last thing on her mind.

While she was at school N and I popped into Oxford for a few hours. We caught the bus back and were chatting away when N stopped in his tracks. “Look,” he said, pointing at a group of ten teenage girls sitting at a café in the afternoon sunshine. "There's L."

Sure enough, it was. The Ramones T-shirt was unmistakable. As the bus crawled past at a snail’s pace I peered closer. L was engrossed in a sheaf of papers, completely oblivious to the two pairs of eyes gawping at her from the bus.

At first I was puzzled about what L could be so gripped by. It came to me in a flash. It was her school report. On the last day of the summer term pupils at her school are handed a large brown envelope with the words “Do not open. Please give to your parents” emblazoned across it.

How times have changed…

Novelists write in weird and wonderful places. JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone sitting in an Edinburgh café with her baby daughter in her pushchair beside her while Maggie Gee writes on buses, trains, beaches, planes, in the park and even in bed.

I’ve been a freelance writer for years now so I mostly work from home. It seems like second nature to be interviewing a school head one minute and then popping downstairs to put a load of washing in the next. It’s admittedly a bit tricky in the school holidays when a sensitive phone interview is punctuated by N’s shrieks of delight from the trampoline or when L bursts into my office at a key moment to demand where her skinny jeans are.

I love my office. It’s not trendily minimalist or hi-tech but it works for me. The walls are lined with books (shoved in higgledy-piggledy so I can never lay my hands on what I’m looking for), L and N's artwork and two wonderful Julian Bailey pictures my mother gave me.

The only drawback is that it also houses the family piano. L and N stopped playing a couple of years back but every time I mention getting rid of the thing there are howls of protest. The removal men shoved it in my office because it wouldn’t fit downstairs and the only time it’s ever played is when the tuner pitches up every six months to put it through its paces. I know it’s ridiculous to pay £60 a year to tune a piano that’s never played but he’s such a nice man and he plays so beautifully that I can’t bring myself to admit the truth. Completely pathetic, I know…

At noon today there’ll be a two-minute national silence to mark the first anniversary of the July 7 bombings.  N and I will be cycling through the sunlit Oxfordshire lanes but at twelve we’re going to stop and remember and reflect.

Many of the survivors and the victims’ families have spoken out so bravely and movingly in the last few days and I keep thinking about the words of two in particular.

One is Marie Fatayi-Williams, whose 26-year-old son Anthony died in the Tavistock Square bus bomb. Marie told BBC journalist Fergal Keane how Anthony had a “good heart” and she still finds it hard to accept he isn’t going to walk through the door and give her a hug. "He was the love of my life," she said. "I had him when I was 24 and he was so full of love."

The other is Rachel North, who was travelling in the first carriage of the Piccadilly Line tube from Kings Cross to Russell Square when the bomb went off seven feet away.

That night Rachel started writing a blog – to be found at http://rachelnorthlondon.blogspot.com - to try and make sense of what had happened. It’s dedicated to the victims of all bomb attacks and this week she wrote: "It feels like a lot longer than a year. I wish I could turn back the clock, that I had never got on the train, that the bombers had changed their minds and decided not to go through with it. I wish."

But she also adds: "Too late. I'm here now, so I will keep putting one foot in front of the other. Because I am alive, when I could be dead. I can speak, when I could be silent forever. I am not alone, and this too will pass."

Brave and inspiring words. Our thoughts are with all of them.

I don’t know what Andrew Marr is thinking of. The TV presenter says he’s stopped washing his hair because he’s fed up with the cost of “depositing a mountain of gloop” on his head – both to his wallet and the environment. He reckons the scalp’s natural oils are all that’s needed to keep his hair glossy and clean.

All I can say is “yuk.” Unwashed hair, either greasy and lank or dry and flaky, is NOT a good look. No way is it going to catch on in our house. L spends hours washing and drying hers (the dreaded straighteners are out of favour, thank goodness) and even N takes an interest in types of shampoo (“nothing girly,” he insists.)

N’s white-blond locks have been the subject of much admiration over the years. When we lived in France, the women in our local boulangerie used to pat two-year-old N sweetly on the head and say “that hair will keep you in your old age.”

It’s incredibly easy to spot N in a crowd because the first thing you see is his hair. Mind you, I rushed him to the hairdresser’s in double-quick time this week after he brought his school photograph home. L leaned over my shoulder as we scoured the picture for N’s blond curls. “His hair’s got so long,” she marvelled when she clocked him. “He looks as though he’s got a scoop of that twirly vanilla ice-cream on his head.”

Needless to say, N was far from amused…

With the summer term drawing to a close L and N are busy planning their holiday activities. At 11, N reckons every second of every day should be filled with sailing courses, trips to the cinema and bucket-loads of ice cream while 14-year-old L relishes the thought of putting homework on the back burner till September and relaxing in the park with her friends.

The trouble is that treats don't come cheap. I’d love to be able to take the whole summer off but sadly I can’t. Like most other working parents I stagger through the long holidays on a wing and a prayer, alternating trips out with days when L and N have to amuse themselves.

Working from home helps a lot, but it still has its tricky moments. Trying to interview the serious-minded boss of a multi-national company with L yelling at N at the top of her voice is fairly typical.

Lots of friends have similar problems. Offices don’t shut up shop for six weeks so how on earth are you supposed to look after your children and work at the same time?

One pal solves the dilemma by enrolling her son on every summer camp going. By the end of the summer he’s a whiz at everything from rock-climbing to go-karting (and utterly exhausted with it.) His poor mum has to spend the next few months working harder than ever to pay for it all. A radio presenter friend resorts to asking her middle-aged male producer to entertain her baby while she's on air and several other friends have retrained as teachers so their holidays coincide with their children’s.

I’m still counting the days till the holidays though...

The August issue of Vogue arrives through the letterbox with a great clunk. I’ve subscribed to the magazine for years and it’s always a treat – a feast of stunning photographs, gorgeous clothes and great writing.

Editor Alexandra Shulman creates a tantalising and eclectic mix of delights and this month is no exception. I love Mario Testino’s pictures of London’s newest bright young things, the I Capture the Castle style fashions and best of all Candida Lycett Green’s eulogy to the sea. You wouldn’t get that combination in any other magazine but it really works.

I was going to write a blog about the lure of the seaside (next time, maybe) but now I’ve got side-tracked thinking about the secret of Vogue’s success. It’s like my passion for The Dangerous Book for Boys all over again. I couldn’t be further from the target market (I don’t own anything by Prada and when it comes to make-up it's Barbara Daly’s Tesco range every time) yet I’m completely beguiled by it. With a cover price of £3.60 some people reckon it’s an extravagance but I’d far rather buy Vogue than a couple of lattes any day.

I’ve just been to the most enjoyable school sports day in years. At N’s last school the event was competitive in every sense – from the quality of parents’ picnics to the 100 metre sprint. The same children won everything year after year while the less sporty boys and girls were consigned to a far corner of the athletics track doing supposedly “fun” things like throwing hoops and hopping, skipping and jumping. N didn’t think they were much fun at all.

At his new school, I’m glad to say, the whole thing is far more relaxed. Everyone took part in three events, competed for their houses rather than their own glory and hooray, there were no picnics at all. In between the races, the pupils wandered around in the sunshine and everyone got a Zoom ice lolly for their efforts. Instead of feeling like an abject failure by the end of the afternoon N was on top of the world.

Some critics sneer at the “all shall have prizes” approach of some schools – but I reckon that when you're only 11 sports day should be wall-to-wall fun.

Mind you, the most competitive participants at the sports days I’ve attended in my time are the parents. L’s first school, a tiny primary in the wilds of North Yorkshire, always held a mothers’ race. A lovely mum who was incredibly laid-back the rest of the year was so determined to win that as soon as the whistle went she developed a competitive instinct Paula Radcliffe would be proud of. One year she came a cropper when she tripped halfway down the school field, tore a ligament and had to be carted off in an ambulance. The children – from reception right through to Year 6 – were utterly gripped. It was the most dramatic finish to a sports day they’d ever seen.

“You must be mad,” said my sister when I told her I was going to a school reunion at the weekend. “I can’t think of anything worse.”

I know what she meant. The idea of meeting up with pals from your youth a quarter of a century later is weird but curiosity got the better of me. That and a flurry of emails from friends saying they’d go if I did. One put it in a nutshell. "It's so not my sort of thing and I keep looking in the mirror and wondering if I can have some Botox or liposuction or just a designer brown paper bag to wear," she said. "But if I don't go to this one I probably never will so it's now or never (and at least I don't need to bring a zimmer frame yet.)"

My sentiments exactly, so on Sunday I summoned up the courage and set off for Dorset, dragging a distinctly unimpressed L and N along for moral support. My husband refused pointblank to come - “I hated school so why on earth should I want to go to your school reunion?” was his excuse.

As we trundled up the imposing drive I felt like a nervous 16-year-old arriving at the place for the first time. L and N were gearing up for a full-scale mutiny by now so I bundled them out of the car, promising N he’d get a swim in the school pool if he played his cards right (“great,” he said with heavy sarcasm), and we rushed in.

I was worried I wouldn’t recognise anyone but apart from a few grey hairs and the odd bald patch (only the men!), no one had changed much. It was a bit disconcerting to find that the new school head, who’s been in her post for a year, looked younger than the rest of us put together, and that loads of the tough-guy rugby players had turned into besotted dads, with toddlers and babies trailing round their ankles.

When I got home I spotted a report in The Times claiming that thanks to horrendous working hours and less neighbourly communities, most of us have far fewer friends than 20 years ago. Don’t know about that - as of last Sunday my circle of friends is back in double figures again…

Wimbledon may be the world's greatest tennis tournament but it bores me rigid. The two-week event was ruined for me when I covered it as a news reporter. Instead of watching needle matches between Becker and Sampras I spent Wimbledon fortnight chasing news stories – the sillier they were, the better show you got in the paper. One year an American player called Anne White dominated the front pages (of the tabloids anyway) for days. Not for her tennis prowess, but because instead of wearing a modest white dress she wowed the crowds in a skintight white catsuit.

When nothing much else was happening, the press pack would resort to old-favourites like ticket touts, corporate hospitality (yawn), rain and the price of a punnet of strawberries. If three or more journalists requested a post-match interview with a player the tennis stars had to talk to us. They'd pitch up at an unprepossessing bunker beneath the Centre Court and while the hacks from the red tops quizzed the players about their sex-lives, the more serious-minded American press retaliated with questions about why they’d hit a volley at break point in the third set. 

After four or five years I was so fed up with the game that I pleaded for a change of scene and got switched to court reporting at the Old Bailey. I’ve never watched a single Wimbledon match since. Give me the World Cup any day.

I’m terribly easily distracted so I rarely switch on the radio or watch daytime TV when I’m working. But I’m so glad I did today. As I drove down the motorway to watch my seven-year-old niece’s school concert I switched on Radio 4 and suddenly found myself transfixed by the most moving programme I’ve heard in years.

When World at One presenter Nick Clarke was diagnosed with cancer in December last year, he was told the only way he’d survive was by having his leg amputated. This morning’s broadcast, Fighting to be Normal, was an amazingly personal audio diary compiled by Nick and his wife Barbara over the past six months. It chronicled Nick’s story, from shortly after receiving his diagnosis, through his recovery from the operation to his eventual homecoming and chemotherapy.

It must have been hard for a news journalist who’s spent his life interviewing other people to record his innermost thoughts in the midst of such trauma but he didn’t baulk at anything, even during his lowest moments.

At times, like when Nick and Barbara’s lively three-year-old twin sons tried to get their heads round what was happening to their dad and when they burst exuberantly into his hospital room after his operation, I had tears streaming down my face. I’m sure every other listener did too.

This was broadcasting at its most powerful. It’s got to win every radio award going this year…

PS: It’s repeated on Radio 4 on Saturday 24^th June at 10.15pm

Readers of earlier blogs will be pleased to know that I kept my word and ordered The Dangerous Book for Boys for N. The only trouble was that when it arrived in the post this morning it turned out to be so fantastic I wanted to keep it for myself. I couldn’t be further from the target market – i.e. 40-something, scared of birds, moths and heights and worst of all, FEMALE – but it’s the most inspiring book I’ve ever seen.

I knew I was going to like it when I read the book’s opening words. “In this age of video games and mobile phones, there must still be a place for knots, tree-houses and stories of incredible courage,” write authors (and brothers) Conn and Hal Iggulden.

I couldn’t have put it better and even though I’m beset with a horrendous set of deadlines I spent the next half-hour happily poring over chapters on how to make paper planes and waterbombs, famous battles, poems every boy should know (Shelley’s glorious Ozymandias for one) and conkers.  I wasn’t quite so entranced by the gory stuff, like how to hunt and cook a rabbit, but 11-year-old boys will probably love it.

Anyway I’ve done the honourable thing and put the book aside to give N when he gets back from school tonight. It was a big wrench though…

PS: If a publisher hasn’t commissioned someone to do a similar book for girls, they’re missing a trick. I'm quite tempted to give it a go myself!

Journalism is a fantastic job - but unless you're Jeremy Paxman or Natasha Kaplinsky it isn't exactly glamorous. One minute you're reporting a grim murder trial at the Old Bailey, the next you’re up to your knees in mud writing about an eccentric recluse living on a Thames houseboat.

When I worked as a hard news reporter on the Evening Standard I’d arrive in the newsroom at 7am in the full knowledge that by the end of the day I could be anywhere – Paris, New York, Scunthorpe, you name it. I once waved goodbye to A at the crack of dawn, got dispatched to Kenya to cover Julie Ward’s horrific murder the instant I set foot in the office and didn’t return home for ten long days. It’s hardly surprising that you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of women reporters in Fleet Street with young children.

Now I’m a freelance writer, journalism is still full of surprises. This morning I had to visit a school in the wilds of Northamptonshire. I spent the morning chatting to the head, was shown round by two delightful 13-year-olds who proudly showed me the contents of every cupboard and then got invited to stay for lunch. I haven’t had a school dinner in nearly 30 years so I was curious to see what they’re like post Jamie Oliver.

As I walked in, the head directed me to the end of a long pine table. Grace was said and we all sat down. But as I gazed along the table everyone fell silent. I was suddenly aware of lots of expectant young faces staring back at me. And then I realised – I was at the head of the table, so it was my role to be the dinner lady and dish up the roast beef, Yorkshire pudding and cabbage. As I said, you don't go into journalism for the glamour…

It’s that time of year again. The sun’s out, the sky’s blue and we’re whiling the afternoon away sitting in Casualty.

The moment summer arrives N is desperate to throw himself into his favourite pursuits. Yesterday he got his bike out for the first time in months, built a makeshift ramp out of bricks and logs and spent a happy hour racing back and forth over them. The two little boys from next door came out to admire his wheelies and N sweetly made a tiny ramp for them out of twigs.

After they went in for lunch N upped the ante – and his speed. With disastrous results. He took the corner too fast, lost control of the bike and flew over the handlebars, landing on his shoulder with an almighty thud.

N’s incredibly brave and doesn’t make a fuss about anything so when he appeared inside sobbing and clutching his shoulder I knew he was in agony. We whizzed straight up the hill to our local A & E (yet another good reason to live in a town) and spent three hours in the blistering heat waiting for his shoulder to be X-rayed.

The upshot was that the doctor didn’t think N had broken anything but had badly bruised his shoulder muscle. She put his arm in a sling, prescribed a course of painkillers and told N he’d be off games for at least a week.

N swears he’ll be sensible and won’t do anything taxing. But keeping him stationary is easier said than done. He’s just popped his head round the door to ask me a question. “Can I go on the trampoline now?” he says.

I adore convertibles. My mum had a bright green Citroen 2CV back in the 70s and we used to drive through the Dorset lanes with the wind in our hair and Dory Previn on the ropey old tape machine. My dad loathed the car because it was noisy and unreliable and my mum went off it when the roof came adrift as she drove along and knocked her half-unconscious. But my sister and I loved it and after my mum moved on to a swankier car she gave it to us. I was so entranced that when it gave up the ghost a couple of years later I bought an identical one in a pale blue Cath Kidston would give her eye teeth for.

Twenty years on I still hankered for another open-top car so last September I threw caution to the wind and bought one. Great – apart from the fact that since I got it there have only been a handful of days when it’s been warm enough to have the roof down. At 11-year-old N’s insistence we tried it in February but we had to wear so many extra layers to keep warm on the school run we gave up.

So when the first glorious heatwave of the summer arrived I rolled up my sleeves, got out my trendiest sunglasses and slapped on the suntan cream. I had the roof down for one short journey before a man on his way home from work took his eye off the road and slammed into the back of me.

Sure enough, as the heatwave drew to a close today and the stormclouds gathered, the garage rang. “Your car’s ready to be picked up,” said a cheery voice.

It was still raining heavily when I drove my car – all shiny and new again – back down the motorway. Looks like I’ve missed my chance to have the roof open till next year.

The newly-published Dangerous Book for Boys is selling like hot cakes and sounds right up N’s street. Written by brothers Conn and Hal Iggulden, it’s a compelling mix of tales of daring deeds and tips on making catapults, skimming stones and climbing trees. All the things, in fact, that preoccupy my daredevil 11-year-old son.

The opening words of the First Aid section could have been written by N himself. “Accidents are going to happen,” it says. “You can’t spend your life worrying about them or you’d never get anything done.”

These are N’s sentiments exactly. This is the boy, after all, who ended up in Casualty three times last summer after attempting manoeuvres on his skateboard that would make a grown man tremble - let alone his mum. He’s been stuck up more trees than I’ve had hot dinners and when I treated him to his first riding lesson at the age of five he emerged saying “I was the only one in the class who dared put my hand in the horse’s mouth!”

Now I’m torn between thinking it’s great that boys are turning the telly off and trying out more perilous pursuits and worrying myself sick about what N’s going to get up to next.

But I’ve still ordered the book!

 A boiling hot day but sadly I’ve been closeted inside catching up with work. Writing a piece about a tricky teenager who smokes, argues with her mum and dad and even pierced her own belly-button with her dad’s computer printer needle, I felt a bit smug.

N was in high-spirits bouncing on the trampoline with the little boys next door  while L was recovering from her school exams with a long lie-in.

Suddenly the mood changed as swiftly as an electric storm. L lost her temper because she didn’t want to walk to Woolworth’s with N and N took offence because I said he wasn’t old enough to go by himself. L made a rude gesture at N and N stomped off in a huff.

As I continued typing about teenagers shouting and screaming at their parents and climbing out of their bedrooms after midnight to go clubbing, my earlier complacency evaporated in a flash. I haven’t mastered the art of being the parent of a teenager after all.

PS: They’re friends again now…

As I drove N to school this morning, the winding Oxfordshire lanes, lined with clouds of lush green cow parsley and bathed in early morning sunshine, looked stunning.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of us lot. Suddenly exposed to a few sunrays after months of drizzle and cold, most of us look as though we’ve never encountered summer before. Apart from a handful of style icons like Kate Moss and Sienna Miller, we haven’t got a clue what to wear during the summer months. When I headed into London on the hottest day of the year yesterday (82 degrees – phew! What a scorcher) I was stunned to see what fellow commuters were wearing. Some were in skimpy frocks more suited to a nightclub in Ibiza, some had opted for those horrible flouncy skirts that don’t look good on anyone and a few were still buttoned up to the neck in dark winter suits.

But the worst offenders in hot weather are the men who emerge in too-short shorts, open-toed sandals that should have been thrown in the dustbin years ago and pudding-basin sunhats that even George Clooney would be hard-pressed to look good in.

Trinny and Susannah – can you step in and give us all a stylish summer makeover?

As the launch date for The Rise and Shine Saturday Show draws nearer I’m still on a steep learning curve.

Despite having had three adult novels published, I knew next to nothing about how the publishing process works till three months ago. I didn’t have a clue about how to get an ISBN number or the importance of printing a barcode on the back cover.

In fact getting an ISBN number turned out to be a piece of cake. They’re only available in batches of ten though, so I’ll have to publish more books to use the other nine up. As for the barcode, my lovely printers, Cox & Whyman, have agreed to sort it for me.

The news that students at an Oxford college have been ordered to dress properly for breakfast cut no ice in our house.

Apparently – shock, horror – students at St Hilda’s have been turning up for their morning brew wearing revealing nighties and skimpy dressing gowns. Some have appeared clad only in bath towels. The students reckon breakfasting in their nighties is one of the privileges of studying at an all girls’ college but the dean is far from impressed. She’s sent out stern letters asking them to “dress appropriately.”

The dean’s words would be like water off a duck’s back as far as my lot are concerned. The world seems to divide into those who get dressed for breakfast and those who don’t – and we certainly don’t. I can’t speak in the mornings till I’ve made myself a strong cup of Earl Grey so I certainly couldn’t cope with getting dressed first. L and N are pretty much the same. In fact night owl L would quite happily drift around all day in her pyjamas (non-matching of course) while the neighbours are perfectly used to seeing N bouncing on the trampoline at dawn in his PJs.

Oh dear. L and N are fed up because half-term’s nearly over and school exams start tomorrow. “You don’t know how hard we have to work,” says L, choosing to ignore the fact that most parents have done a few exams in their time.

Half-term was a treat though – culminating in a trip to London with my mum’s great friend Sally. As usual, Sally had more energy than the rest of us put together – running up escalators, plotting nifty routes round the capital and rounding off the expedition by asking L and N to re-teach her Spit, the card game she taught me and my sister when we were little.

We started the day with the wonderful Front Page exhibition at the British Library – marvelling at infamous newsaper splashes from the last 100 years (Titanic Goes Down Off Cape Race through to Freddie Starr Ate my Hamster) and having a go at designing a front page ourselves.

Next stop was the Imperial War Museum. What a place. It’s got everything from a Spitfire and Doodlebug dangling from the glass domed roof to a terrific exhibition called Great Escapes, about the extraordinary escape attempts made by Allied servicemen during the Second World War. Among the poignant accounts and staggeringly inventive bids to escape – everything from hiding inside a wooden vaulting horse to building a home-made aircraft out of old mattress ticking – I came across my new favourite quote.

It was written by Flight Lieutenant Oliver Philpot, one of the three servicemen who escaped from the notorious prison camp Stalag Luft III in 1943. “I hauled myself out of the tunnel, streaked across the little road and into those heavenly pine trees which gave cover,” he wrote. “And there was no shot, no shouting, no nothing. Just the trees and freedom.”

Up until last night I only had a vague idea of who TV presenter Gail Porter is. I knew she hit the headlines a few years back when her naked image was projected 60ft high on the side of the Houses of Parliament and that in recent months she’s been suffering from alopecia. But that was about it.

After watching the BBC1 documentary Gail Porter Laid Bare, I’m her newest fan.

All Gail’s hair fell out – along with her eyebrows and eyelashes - after she suffered postnatal depression and went through a traumatic divorce. Yet as she talked with searing honesty about her baldness and the effect it’s had on her life, she refused to feel sorry for herself. She’s working harder than ever before, caring for her adorable daughter Honey and has recently posed with raw cotton draped on her bare head to promote Fairtrade. During the programme she tried on a few wigs with a fellow alopecia sufferer but decided they weren’t quite her and she'd rather not wear one.

In an age when we’re all obsessed with how we look, Gail Porter is truly amazing.

World Cup fever is here with a vengeance. There’s more than a week to go but England flags are festooned everywhere, children are proudly sporting replica T-shirts and the shops are ablaze with red and white plates, mugs and stickers.

I love football but I’ve always been a bit dubious about drivers who fly England flags from their cars. My prejudice was tested to the limit on Friday night when I sat in my car waiting to turn right. All of a sudden there was an almighty crash and the sound of splintering glass. Someone had smashed into me.

As the busy rush-hour traffic roared past I gingerly got out of my car. Behind me was a Ford with a crushed bonnet, wonky bumper and England flags waving jauntily from each door.

I’m ashamed to say that when I spotted the flags I half expected a young joyrider to rev the engine and zoom off down the road. Far from it. A shocked-looking middle-aged driver emerged and repeated over and over again: “I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me. I took my eye off the ball. I’ve never had an accident before.”

He looked so wretched – especially when his wife arrived with his insurance documents and tore him off a strip – that I didn’t have the heart to be cross. The paperwork’s going to take weeks to sort out and my car looks as if it’s gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson but neither of us were hurt and the cars will mend. I won’t jump to conclusions about those flags again either.

Jamie Oliver’s new restaurant, Fifteen Cornwall, sounds sensational. It’s got everything – stunning views over the surf at Watergate Bay, amazing chefs (even Fay Maschler, the doyenne of restaurant critics, has given it the thumbs-up) and 21 young trainees plucked from underprivileged backgrounds to learn new skills and boost their self-respect.

It also turns out that the project would never have got off the starting blocks if it hadn’t been for a single-minded Cornish grandmother called Betty Hale. She was so determined to help young people in Cornwall that she bombarded Jamie with emails asking him to open a restaurant in the county. She sent hampers of delicious local produce and even paid his advisers’ air fares to make them visit.

“Because Cornwall is a poor county there are not many opportunities here,” says the redoubtable Betty. “I found a new excuse to get in touch with Jamie’s office every week. They could have given me the brush-off but for some reason they didn’t.”

Not surprisingly, Betty was a star guest at the launch of Fifteen Cornwall. Jamie also revealed the reason Betty’s emails caught his eye in the first place. He receives thousands of messages a day but hers stood out because they were so polite…

Another bank holiday, another six-hour stint on the motorway. L passed the journey to a family party in the Lake District by plugging herself into her iPod and her new favourite band. They’re called Panic! At the Disco and their music makes me want to go and lie down in a quiet corner.

N and I opted for an Enid Blyton CD that came free with last week’s Daily Telegraph. We were pretty dubious about it but five minutes into Five on a Treasure Island and we were utterly hooked. The story sounds hopelessly old-fashioned, with children who spend their days swimming at a Dorset cove, taking a brown mongrel called Timmy for long walks and solving the mystery of an ancient shipwreck.

Enid Blyton doesn’t get a good press these days. Some critics reckon her vocabulary is hopelessly limited while others accuse her of being elitist, racist and sexist. I agree prissy Anne and her liking for party frocks and dolls are a bit hard to take but there’s no doubt that Blyton could spin a good yarn.

What struck me most was the freedom children had in her day. Julian, Dick, Anne and their tomboy cousin George are all aged between 11 and 13 but they dash out of the house after breakfast, land themselves in loads of scrapes` and don’t come back till tea-time. They’re allowed to row out to Kirrin Island by themselves and camp there alone for two days. Two days! It sends me into a cold sweat thinking about it.

It all sounded so exhilarating that when we got to the Newlands Valley I let N tear down the valley by himself on his mountain board (a scary all-terrain version of a skateboard.) He spent the weekend zooming up and down the muddy fields on his board – much to the astonishment of passing walkers. By Bank Holiday Monday he was covered in bruises, caked in mud and thrilled to bits with the dazzling new manoeuvres he’d mastered. I don't know if Enid Blyton would have approved or not...

The news that sheep aren’t stupid doesn’t surprise me in the least. Scientists who’ve spent years analysing them have come to the conclusion that they are woolly-Einsteins. They can recognise up to 50 faces, identify each other’s baas and, I’m not totally convinced by this one, count up to three.

When we left London for the wilds of the Lancashire countryside a few years back I was astonished to discover that sheep weren’t the dozy characters I’d assumed. Far from it  – they’re resourceful, athletic creatures who’ll stop at nothing to get what they want. They were so desperate to get their teeth into our not so lush lawn that they used to shin up a five-foot rampart, trot bold as brass along the top of the garden wall and jump down the other side.

They were also the noisiest neighbours imaginable. They were so rowdy one night that L shrieked loud enough to wake the neighbours half a mile away. The ensuing commotion was so deafening it got a mention on Radio 2 – my DJ friend Alex Lester was staying for the weekend to get a bit of rural peace and quiet. It probably put him off the country for life…

There was no way in a million years that former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell was ever going to call her baby daughter something plain and simple like Mary or Jane. And sure enough she’s come up with a corker. Bluebell Madonna sounds like an exotic cocktail and is more than a match for her pal Posh’s children – Brooklyn, Romeo and Cruz.

Choosing children’s names is always fraught with difficulty. Relations are quick to take offence if the baby is named after one side of the family and not the other. “Where did that come from?” asked my mother-in-law when we told her N’s name. It’s also a good idea to check the baby’s initials don’t spell something dire and that the names don’t rhyme embarrassingly. On the day L was born we were about to tell the world that our darling daughter was called Lottie Rose when I stopped in my tracks. I could just hear her classmates nicknaming her Snotty Nose the minute she started school. We had a quick rethink.

The best tip I’ve ever heard when choosing names was from my down-to-earth Lancashire grandmother. Her advice? Open the back door and shout: “Bluebell Madonna. It’s time for your tea.” If it sounds completely ridiculous, go back to the drawing board.

Happiness is all the rage these days. First the new head of Wellington College puts happiness lessons on the school curriculum. Now Tory leader David Cameron delivers a speech about well-being and happiness and tells us “there’s more to life than money.”

Ensconced in his stylish Notting Hill bubble, he clearly hasn’t got a clue how most people live. Job-shares and family-friendly hours aren’t an option when you have to pay the mortgage and put food on the table. Lots of today’s parents have to work more, not less, just to get by.

If my mum had been alive she would have been absolutely appalled by his words. Noel Coward’s “work’s more fun than fun” was one of her favourite sayings. She never stopped working. She always got to the office at the crack of dawn, hated taking holidays and even on the day she became ill refused to leave till she’d filed her last interview.

My mum was lucky to have a job she adored. Lots of people don’t – but it still doesn’t mean they have the luxury of knocking off early and spending more time at home.

The kitchen floor is a sea of sopping wet clothes, camping gear and muddy walking boots. The washing machine is going non-stop (it’s emitting weird clanking noises in protest) and L looks so pale and exhausted it’s a struggle to get her to school this morning.

My intrepid 14-year-old spent the weekend on a school camping trip in Wales, designed to prepare her and her classmates for their two-week trek across the Atlas Mountains this summer. She’s raised nearly £200 for the trip by babysitting for her cousins and is counting the weeks till Departure Day in July. But considering she spends most of her free time wandering round the shops and drinking Frappucinos with her friends, the hearty training expedition came as a shock.

L had to walk six miles each day with her rucksack on her back, put up her own tent and cook supper on a camp-fire. The girls only got three hours sleep because they pitched their tent on a slope and then gossiped till the early hours. It poured with rain all weekend so they were drenched from start to finish. L cut a dash when she emerged from the school minibus on Sunday afternoon in her pyjamas – “everything else is soaked,” she grinned.

Just to compound the washing machine’s burden, N arrived home at the same time wearing a different set of clothes from the ones he’d left in. He’d spent the morning rowing with his pals and was terribly excited to be allowed to row a single scull. His excitement was somewhat dampened when he capsized the boat and plunged headfirst into the icy waters of the River Nene.

But ever the optimist, a shivering N looked on the bright side. “I’m supposed to be doing my capsize drill soon,” he said. “I won’t have to bother now.”

The Criminal Records Bureau has come in for yet another bashing in today’s papers. Nearly 1,500 law-abiding citizens have been wrongly labelled as criminals – errors that have led to some being refused jobs or university places, and others threatened with the sack.

If my experience of the CRB is anything to go by, things haven’t improved much in the last three years. When I signed up to do some teaching in the autumn of 2002 it took more than three months to get my disclosure certificate confirming that I was a suitable person to work with children and young people. I'd already taught loads of students by the time it came through.

In my case the CRB couldn’t get their heads around the fact that although I’m married I've never changed my name. They rang me twice at home and wrote me a stern letter. When I remarked that it’s pretty common for women to keep their maiden names these days I was told they’d never come across such a thing before...

The sun’s out, the wisteria is in full bloom and just occasionally  it’s warm enough to have lunch outside. The only drawback is that summertime also means exam-time – and our house is no exception. 

Our house is always pretty chaotic, but this morning was even more shambolic than usual. L caught the school bus by the skin of her teeth, the kitchen drain blocked, spewing soapsuds all over the place, and then N had a minor stress when he arrived at school.

He’d forgotten it was a no-uniform day, with pupils paying £2 to charity for the privilege of wearing their own kit. So while N turned up in his school blazer and tie, his pals all looked super-cool in their home clothes. There was only one thing for it. Despite N hissing at me through gritted teeth that he’d be fine (but clearly not being fine at all) I hared back home, grabbed his favourite jeans, Animal T-shirt and Vans trainers and deposited them in a heap outside his classroom. Yet another advantage of working from home and not having a boss monitoring my every move.

Clothes are a bone of contention for virtually every parent I know. L goes to school in the most laddered tights I’ve ever seen (apparently that’s the look nowadays), pulls the sleeves of her jumper right over her fingers and even when it’s pouring with rain refuses pointblank to wear a coat. N never does his laces up and doodles on his cuffs when he’s bored.

At least they both have to wear school uniform. When L was at primary school in North Yorkshire she and her classmates could turn up in anything they liked. Some little girls wore heels so high they couldn’t run around the playground without tripping over while others arrived for lessons looking like Britney Spears. L once came home from school in tears because an older girl (ten at the most) said her trousers were “gross.” She shoved them to the back of the wardrobe and never wore them again.

Working from home is brilliant in lots of ways. I can start work when I want, meet L and N from school most days and even have lunch with a friend without a tyrannical boss yelling at me for being late back.

But just occasionally I get wistful about working in an office – the gossip, the banter, the drinks after work. The best place I ever worked was the Evening Standard, where I spent five years as a hard news reporter in the 1980s. London’s evening paper was based in Fleet Street back then and it was a different world.