Do you ever go to book festivals? There is one every autumn in Wimbledon which attracts some big authorial names - William Boyd, David Nicolls, Andrew O’Hagan, Alistair Campbell. And when I was promoting my book Living the Life More Fabulous I was invited to speak at festivals in Oxford, Glasgow, Henley, Leeds and at The Theatre by The Lake in Keswick. I enjoyed these events enormously, not least because afterwards I got to sign books for a long line of the most elegant and

In the novel that I am currently writing which, at the start, is set in the early 1960s, there is an unpleasant character called Edna Blaney who doesn’t believe in praise. She subscribes to the notion that children need to know when they have done wrong, but they don’t necessarily need to know when they have done right. When I was writing this character, who was very vivid to me, I realised that she was an amalgam of many teachers and other adults who populated my childhood.

Let’s face it, if I had just given birth to an actual baby, you might already have heard about it. Mine is somewhat different but it also involves a moment of conception, a long period of gestation over several months, followed by quite a challenging birth when, with the help of a wonderful Irish friend, Siobhan, who acted as my secret midwife, my baby was brought into the world.

We’re supposed to go to school to learn the 3Rs, but only two of them ever really appealed to me. Reading and writing. Words. I loved words. I did not love numbers and they didn’t like me. I now have a granddaughter who struggles with Maths and my heart goes out to her, because, like me she was an early, fluent reader and she loves it when I read to her, or more often these days, she reads to me.