My next book is finished! Hello flowers!

It's a lovely feeling. I've actually emerged from my workroom and been out on big walks with the dog and drives in the country like old people do! Hence the pics of flowers. Jimmy unearthed a book called 'The Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe' which we've been taking on our jaunts. One of our sons asked, 'Is it issued automatically when you turn 50?' But I don't care because I HAVE BEEN OUT OF THE HOUSE! 

After months of grafting away, I can't tell you what a relief this is. I used to find this part - sending a book to my editor, and waiting for her feedback - completely terrifying. I don't anymore. Not because I think it's perfect - every book comes bouncing back to me, requiring loads of fixes - but because it's basically written which means the hard graft is done.

It's also the first book I've managed to finish at home, with normal life going on around me, rather than hiding away in a hotel for a few days. There are several reasons for this. First, my kids have reached that age (boys 17, daughter 14) when they no longer want to converse with me. In fact, days - WEEKS - can go by and no one bothers me at all.  The older they get, the higher my daily word count. I'm hoping that, by the time my boys are 19, I'll be dashing off 10,000 words a day.

Also, I realised how much I hate leaving my family to go away and work alone. It's utterly miserable. Going away should involve much laughter and fun and chat and alcohol, but holing up in a hotel room to finish a book means no such pleasures are allowed. So you sit there, typing, feeling deprived of fun - and also horribly ungrateful because you're in a hotel and should be enjoying yourself. Basically, much of it involves gazing mournfully out of a window which won't open properly and wondering what everyone else is doing. 

This time last year, I was in self-imposed exile in a Premier Inn in central Glasgow. Yes, I battered through the final chapters and got lots done. I wasn't having to break off to throw a chicken in the oven or wash anyone's pants. But I have never been so bloody lonely in all my born days. Only a friend dropping by to take me out for sushi - and sneaking out to Frasers to buy a ruinously expensive BB cream - saved me from tipping over into insanity.

I vowed to never put myself through that again. In fact I work better these days amidst the muddle of music and TV and people shouting and life going on about me - in other words, all the usual hubbub of home.  I also enjoy writing on trains and in coffee shops. But more than anything, after months and months of battering away at the keyboard there's nothing nicer than not writing at all. To be idle of finger, and devoid of plot-related thoughts - to stop working and admire the flowers. By the way, 'The Wild Flowers of Britain and Europe' is an excellent reference guide, if you ever find yourself with time on your hands. 

The almighty trauma of the school photo

Facebook's been full of school photos this week. Parents whose children have just left primary school have been posting pics of their children - sweet pictures showing big smiles. It struck me that, during the primary years, those regulation school photos (mottled grey/blue background, hair neatly combed) are fine, usually. It's in secondary school that the whole business becomes something else entirely. 

Take this: Exhibit A. It's my husband Jimmy, aged about five, with neat side parting and finger waves (his dad was a barber). It's a lovely picture, I think. I like it so much, I persuaded him to use it on our wedding invitation.

Then there's this: Exhibit B. That's me at about seven, girlie swot in the school library in a polo neck sweater. I wasn't embarrassed that Mum had sewn braid around the neck. In fact, I'd probably asked her to do it.

Then we come to Exhibit C when I'm about 13. I'm no longer happily parked behind a table of books. I am a seething mass of hormones and mortification. There's so much wrong with this picture I don't know where to start. 

By that point I had decided that my nose was so large, I had better do something to detract attention from it - hence the two low pigtails, which I hoped would make it look smaller. I'm not quite sure how that was supposed to work, but it was a trick I believe I'd read in Jackie magazine (big pigtails = smaller nose, in comparison!). I'm also caught in a half-blink, and my fringe was obviously cut by my mum, possibly during a power cut using those round-ended scissors that small children use to cut paper.

As a final touch, in the actual photo, inky blots are visible on the hand I've raised, as if waving feebly at the photographer. 

We keep reading how under stress teenagers are these days, with social media and the relentless pressure to be as skinny as Cara Delevigne. Okay, I didn't have that to contend with. This picture was taken around 1978. Cara had yet to be born. And I never aspired to look like one of the models in my favourite magazine. But at least today's teens are allowed to go to proper hairdressers and would surely remember to wash their hands before having a photo taken. 

Come to think of it, it's been years since I have been offered a school photo 'for approval' from my kids' school. Either the school has stopped doing them or my offspring have decided to not bring them home. Perhaps I'm a bad parent because I never think to ask. Back in the day, though, my own mum would ask, 'Have your school photos arrived yet?' and she'd snatch them from me, all excited. 

I remember her looking at this one in particular. 'Oh,' was all she said.  

We left the kids home alone... for a week!

My kids' school just had a talk about university applications. It was all about this course and that course and all I could think was, How can this be? That my boys will soon be applying for college or uni and washing their own pants? 

It only seems like last week that I was shepherding them home from the park, dripping and filthy and attracting those 'Look at those poor, sodden children!' type looks. I walked through the park yesterday for the first time in about eight years. It's been completely gentrified with a renovated paddling pool and loads of shiny new play equipment. In our day there'd been a burnt-out climbing frame and a stinky little hut full of fag butts.

But actually, I'm enjoying the fact that they're older. The whole uni/college thing is thrilling to me because I didn't go.  I left school at seventeen - the age my boys are now - and, thanks to my dad spotting a tiny recruitment ad in our local paper, applied for a job as a trainee journalist at DC Thomson in Dundee, publishers of Jackie magazine.  

Is anything more thrilling than leaving home? I was desperate to get the hell out. Having applied for art school, and failed to gain a place due to being pretty crappy at drawing, I realised how lucky I was to get a job of any description, let alone one on the magazine I'd loved since I was thirteen. The next three years were spent writing about blusher and how to make 'Dave' notice you. I lived in a bedsit, then flatshares, surviving on toast and beer, mostly. It was like being a student, without the lectures - the average age in the Jackie office was about nineteen.

Jimmy and I gave our boys a taste of independent living recently, and left them home alone for a week. We'd asked them if they wanted to come on holiday with us (our daughter had been whisked off to Spain by her friend's family) and they replied with a resounding 'NO THANKS.' Then they proceeded to organise a 'gathering'. Yes, I was worried about returning home to be greeted by inebriated teenagers and scowling police. But, desperate for a break, we set off.

Friends moan about not being 'needed' any more, and feeling redundant, but these days I think, what are you on about? Who wants to be needed every minute of the day? I've had seventeen years of being on hand, attending to my offspring's every needs, and my reserves of patience and dutifulness have all run out - peeling the top off a pot of Petit Filous would break me now. Anyway, Jimmy and I had a marvellous time, doing the stuff we love to do - chatting, eating, looking at art, quaffing a bottle of rose over a salad nicoise at lunchtime. And we came home to a tidy house and no evidence of excessive partying.

My chilli plants had been watered. There was milk in the fridge. One of my boys reported that he'd made a Caesar salad - yes, an actual salad, with leaves. 'Next time,' he said, 'you might as well go away for two weeks.'