An Author's Notebook

There comes a time in a woman's life when she doubts herself. Wonders if she's made the right choices. Inevitably, she looks around...

The shocking murder of Sarah Everard has unleashed a torrent of emotion around male harassment of women. Abductions of young women are tra...

Two themes are dominating my notebook this week - literary festivals and our imminent move to a new house. In amongst pages of removal quote...

Hermaphrodite Mum   Three kids and a single mum   "Are you alright?" asks Middle Child anxiously. I am beached on the sofa, o...

I blame Facebook. For all those wasted hours. Every morning, I settle down in front of my computer, flex my fingers above the keyboard and m...

Whenever I succumb to a bit of navel-gazing, the subject is always the same. How to be happy. You'd have thought I'd got it sussed b...

Back in June, during our days of political turmoil in the UK, a friend texted me to say that her six-year old daughter had stated Theres...

Silence descends on the house. The kids are back at school, the dog has been walked and I am finally free to get on with some work. For the ...

My feet have hardly touched the ground since 2016 kicked off in a burst of fireworks over the banks of the river Thames. Once the kids were ...

Hermaphrodite Mum Three kids and a single mum I'm just off to analyse some intelligence and plan a few operations in the field. What? ...

In 1403 an enterprising group of booksellers (known as stationers) set up a fraternity of tradesmen. A few hundred years later in 1670, aft...

New research from the US shows that mums are crying out for flexible jobs. Hulafrog , a network of US parenting sites, co-founded by my frie...

Some of you may know my darkest secret: I attended a boarding school known as The Cheltenham Ladies' College . For years, during partie...

Women and work. It has never been an easy coupling when you throw children into the mix. Those of us choosing to stay at home are now  domes...