Mostly it’s been family commitments that have kept me away from my computer – elderly parents, teenage children, the usual – but I’ve also been teaching, and one job has led to another, until now I’m schlepping all over London, trying variously to help younger children unlock their creativity and older ones pass exams. I have been writing a bit, too: I signed up for NanNoWriMo, which for those of you who don’t already know is a scheme aimed primarily at people who need encouragement to finish a book. The idea is that you produce 50,000 words during November, which works out at 1,700 words per day. I managed this for the first few days, but only by staying up until 3 am, not something I wanted to sustain for a whole month, but I did manage to bring the total word count for my novel in progress to over 50,000 words. Then I met my former Goldsmiths tutor, Pam Johnson (see her excellent blog, Words Unlimited) at the launch of my friend Sara Grant’s novel, Dark Parties and she recommended doing what she’s doing with a group of writer friends: each sending the others 500 words a week. So that’s what I’m doing with my friend Emily. Nothing concentrates the writer’s mind like a deadline, and even I can’t find an excuse for not writing that amount.

I’ve been to a few plays – mostly at the National, because their £12 tickets are all we can afford nowadays: A Woman Killed by Kindness, One Man, Two Guvnors, Juno and the Paycock, but we did splash out for the Catherine Tate/David Tennant Much Ado and just before Christmas, finally got to see Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, which was well worth it, as Mark Rylance’s performance was just as dazzling as everyone had said it was. Not so sure about the other one, though: I enjoyed it, but although Tennant was good, Catherine Tate was mostly Catherine Tate – and sometimes Frankie Howerd. I don’t see any problem with star vehicles that draw in a wider audience, but if the point is to attract people who don’t normally go to the theatre, surely there should be some attempt to win them over to the unique qualities of a theatre experience, rather than serving them up more of what they’re used to? I should have liked to see Ralph Fiennes Prospero, but I would have needed to remortgage the house to afford tickets. The way things are going in the West End, it won’t be long before going to see a play is as expensive as going to the opera – which, I suppose, is why directors want people off the telly to attract the punters, who are more expensive to hire, and so it goes on…

Another cultural highlight of last summer was the chance to dress up in medieval costume and wander through the streets around Borough market handing out leaflets for a Poet in the City talk on Chaucer. Although the sleeves got in the way a bit, I soon forgot that I was wearing costume, so I was teken aback when some tourists asked to have their picture taken with me…

Anyone who knows me well will be relieved to learn that I wasn’t among those selected to carry the Olympic torch. My children thought it was hysterical that anyone might even consider putting a flaming object in my hand and sending me running through a built-up area, but luckily there were enough rather more worthy candidates to fill the places. At least now London is safe from conflagration.

Being nominated to carry the torch didn’t help us get any tickets, though, despite the fact that we live in an Olympic borough, so we’re just going to have to keep our heads down – or move away for the duration – while the Games are on.

When I first heard about Jamie Byng’s plans for a massive give-away of free books I wasn’t sure what to think, but as the day approached its merits became clearer. I fully understand the concerns of some independent booksellers that giving away books might be sending out the wrong message in the age of the free download, but I believe that anything that celebrates books and reading is a good thing. If you read a book that you’ve been given for free and you like it, you may well seek out other titles by the same author. You might borrow it from a library rather than buy it, but I don’t believe that having received the first book for free will influence that either way – if you’re someone who buys books, you’ll continue to buy them, and if you can’t afford to buy them or you don’t have room for them in your home, you’ll visit the library. I’ve done plenty of both in my time: when I was growing up my parents couldn’t afford a car or a phone, so we certainly didn’t have the money for books; as an unreconstructed bibliophile I now own thousands, even if they mostly come from charity shops. When I was young I was unemployed for a while and didn’t have enough money to do anything but visit the local library, go home and sit and read at least one novel a day. The right to free access to books is essential, and it shouldn’t be taken away by local authorities keen to save money by closing local libraries, claiming that there are others within the borough that people can just as easily use. Not everyone can drive and if you’re elderly, disabled, a young mother with a pushchair and more than one small child, or just too poor to be able to afford the bus fare, you may not be able to travel that extra couple of miles.

As I told the audience on Saturday night, I wouldn’t have been there if I hadn’t found and agent, and I wouldn’t have found an agent if I hadn’t done an MA in Creative Writing at Goldsmiths, and how did I find out about the course? I saw a flyer in my local library, a library that’s due to close down in a couple of months.

I didn’t attend the big event in Trafalgar Square the night before as I was at the National Theatre listening to Brian Cox (the Hadron Collider ex-pop star one, not the gruff Scottish actor) discuss the science of Frankenstein with biographer Richard Holmes. My daughter had made the rather uncharitable comment that she expected most of the audience would be middle-aged women with little genuine interest in science, but she was wrong: there were people of all ages and both sexes, although I couldn’t vouch for their scientific knowledge. It was interesting to learn about early experiments that used electricity to try to reanimate bodies, but in 45 minutes they could only touch briefly on science then and now. As someone who got a ‘C’ for Chemistry ‘O’ Level and didn’t even take Physics, I do feel that my scientific knowledge is poor, but when I watch Professor Cox’s tv programmes about the stars, fascinating though they are, they make my imagination hurt. I don’t understand how he manages to be so relentlessly perky when talking – as he did in the first episode of his new series – about a time when the stars will all go out and time itself will cease to have any meaning in a cold, dark universe where nothing happens. I would have finished this post a week ago, but after watching that, blogging seemed suddenly rather futile.

I recently discovered that my novel is now available on Kindle, which came as a surprise – although I don’t know why, as I suppose most novels still currently in print will be. Given my dismay at the thought of electronic readers replacing my beloved books I was initially less than pleased; then I thought about royalties, and cheered up.

Twice over Christmas I was at a party when someone came along and informed the person I was talking to that I was a writer. One minute we were two people having an inconsequential chat, the next I felt as if I were expected to say something clever or witty – to perform in some way. Although I’m always pleasantly surprised when someone finds scribbling for a living impressive, I’m also aware that I let down the side somewhat. I could pretend to do something else, but then there are few professions that I could discuss convincingly. My friend Alastair works for what used to be the London Rubber Company, manufacturer of condoms, and he had a girlfriend who was employed by a company that made sanitary towels. Whenever someone at a party asked them what they did it killed the conversation stone dead, so maybe I should just pretend to be a rubber technologist, like him, and no-one will ask me quastions about what I do.

So Waterstones is to close 20 of its stores. Like a lot of people, I have mixed feelings about its monopoly in the high street, but as so many independent bookshops have been forced out of business it provides the only place that many of us can go and physically browse through books. I’m still reeling from my attempt to buy Phillip Pullman’s Four Tales in Smith’s in Lewisham. After searching in every likely place without success, I went to the enquiry desk, where I was asked to spell the name. The young man behind the counter didn’t seem in the least perturbed by the fact that he hadn’t heard of Pullman, nor that he couldn’t tell me whether they had the book. He called over the manager and another member of staff, who led me in a little procession around the shelves, the manager holding aloft the device that was supposed to tell him whether an item was in stock as he tried to get find a signal, until I lost patience and said I’d get it from Amazon – which I duly did, sitting ay my desk at midnight…

I shall be taking part in an event at Forest Hill Library to celebrate World Book Night on 5th March, so if anyone’s in the vicinity, come along and join us. It will be from 4.30 to 8pm, I believe, but I’ll post the details when I know more.

We had been prepared for her to take a gap year if she wasn’t happy with any of her offers, or simply didn’t feel ready, but with the planned increase in fees that seems unlikely, as we’d like to see at least one child settled in higher education before the cost doubles. She’s intending to join Wednesday’s protest, which pleases me, as it shows that she’s inherited my bolshie gene – and not just the complete lack of spatial ability and failure to grasp the concept of linear time.

As a result of the above I haven’t been writing much in recent months, but I did manage to produce a new short story for the Bridport. It was short-listed, which made me very happy. It may seem pathetic to be excited about not winning a prize, but I’d been wondering whether I’d lost the ability to write, so it was gratifying to receive some validation. Fired with enthusiasm I wrote another one for the Sunday Times short story award. I was pleased with it, but as this is a competition that’s only open to published writers and last year the long list read like a who’s who of the great and the good of contemporary fiction in English, my chances could best be described as slim. I probably didn’t help matters by deciding to deliver my entry by hand to the Book Trust and bursting in through what turned out to be the back door, to find myself at the top of the basement stairs looking down at three bemused women who had buzzed me in on the assumption that I was a courier, and not a somewhat dishevelled middle-aged author.

Now that’s out of the way I should be trying to make some progress with the next novel before Christmas madness envelops us; instead I’ve been having a clear out and sorting old toys and books to donate to school fairs. I’ve also finally started Wolf Hall, and with the amount of time I have to read it will probably take me until Christmas to finish it. As much of my reading is done on public transport, I’m beginning to see why most people favour paperbacks: it takes up so much space in my bag that I sometimes decide to leave it behind and buy a paper instead.

This is one of the reasons that my friend Sara has acquired a Kindle, something that provoked a great deal of debate in our writers’ group. Although she has no intention of giving up on bound books – and indeed had a beautifully illustrated paperback with her when we met – she intends to use it when she travels and needs to take several books with her. Rationally, I can see the wisdom of this, but my attachment to books is so great that I’d even miss the ritual of trying to stuff as many as I can down the sides of suitcases – not to mention opening a volume and finding that the pages have been distorted by water and there are still grains of sand lodged in the spine, reminding me of first reading them on a beach or beside a pool. Of course it would make life a whole lot easier if the thousands of books we possess as a family could be captured in one small electronic device – but then they wouldn’t be captured, would they? The words would be there, but not the cover illustrations, the stains on the pages, the notes scribbled in the margins, the old bus tickets used as bookmarks.

One of my greatest pleasures is searching the shelves of charity shops for bargains (I know some writers think there should be some kind of royalty payment for the resale of books, but I don’t understand the logic of that), and I like to lend out books, which isn’t yet possible with the electronic versions. Most of all, though, it’s the sense of ownership that’s lacking: it’s not my precious unless I can turn the volume over in my hands and fan its pages. Once when I was going on holiday I hid my building society pass-book on the shelves; being heavily pregnant, by the time I returned I’d forgotten which book it was in and had to request a new one. 7 years later, following a conversation with a pregnant friend who had concealed and then lost some cash in the same way, I went back home, took down a volume, and there was the pass-book. What had I used as a hiding place? Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Now you couldn’t do that with a Kindle.

We spent a week in Amsterdam and loved it. I’d been worried that the children might be bored by a city holiday, but there was a room in the hotel with free internet access, so at least my daughter got her Facebook fix every day. My son wasn’t wildly impressed at being dragged to the Van Gogh, Frans Hals and the Rijksmuseum, but he went, even if he did spend most of the time sitting on benches looking dejected and wishing someone would adopt him.

As we normally stay in the kind of places where we have to sleep on put-you-up beds speckled with stains that would set a CSI’s pulses racing, I insisted on chosing the hotel this time. The one I went for has been converted from the offices of a shipping company and was the first building of the ‘Amsterdam School’. It was built in the shape of the prow of a ship and the marble floors and oak doors have been left intact. The counter with windows where people would have bought tickets or paid for goods to be shipped is still on the second floor and the rooms contain cupboards and shelves that would once have contained files and papers. The wraiths of long-gone office workers seem to cross your path wherever you go. The pool was good too, as was the free minibar. Our suitcases must have been twice as heavy on the way home, thanks to all the miniatures we’d smuggled out. We were close to the station and in the heart of the Red Light district, so my son saw most of the vicinity through a lattice of my fingers. On reflection, perhaps he didn’t have as good a time as the rest of us.

I downloaded my photos when I got home and was trawling through them, marvelling at the way digital technology allows someone as clueless as me to reposition, resize, sharpen and otherwise tweak my pictures before printing them, when I suffered a pang of nostalgia for the days when you had to take your film to the chemist and wait at least 24 hours before collecting your fat envelope of snaps. The excitement of looking at them and recalling the moments they captured is a thing of the past now that every picture we take can be viewed instantly and deleted if found wanting. We can edit our lives as we go, leaving only the best bits. Photographs that reveal secrets are a rich source of material for writers – Penelope Fitzgerald wrote a whole novel based on the consequences of a man’s discovery of a photo of his late wife in which she is holding hands with someone other than himself; that would be less credible today, when the photographer, seeing what he’d captured, would be able to censor it with the click of a button and the offending picture would be gone, along with the premise for the book…

Then I came to a couple of pictures that appeared to show a blancmange-like expanse with a smear of red in one corner. The next photo brought it all rushing back: my partner had cut himself on a cracked toilet seat in the hotel and, being a lawyer, had asked me to photograph his injured buttock just in case he developed something unpleasant as a result (don’t you wish you had my life?). Instantly I was grateful that I didn’t have to face a chemist who’d developed that particular set of pictures.

Watched Review with particular interest on Friday, as it was devoted to the future of the novel – will it continue in its present physical form or be replaced by e-readers and will it continue in its present fictional form or assimilate more aspects of ‘non-fiction’, using real people and events? Naturally enough the assembled writers thought there was plenty of life left in the novel as we know it now, although they did suggest, depressingly, that it’s becoming harder to pitch ‘quiet’ novels, as publishers believe readers want dramatic plots. It’s particularly depressing for me, as my next novel, should it ever see the light of day, is likely to be so quiet that it’s almost inaudible. I’d only read one of the books from the Booker long list that were discussed in the context of novels based on actual events, and that was Emma Donoghue’s Room, partly informed by the Fritzl case. The notion that a book could be life-affirming when its narrator is a 5 year-old boy who was born in captivity and believes that the only person in the world apart from him and his mother is their captor – who the reader knows has fathered him as a result of raping his mother – might seem unlikely, but Jack is such an engaging character, and Donoghue navigates so skilfully around the pitfalls of sensationalism and sentimentality that it works. We can all think of novels whose critical acclaim seems based more on their subject matter than the quality of the writing, and I firmly believe that a writer has to earn her subject matter; I think Donoghue does.

My daughter is writing an essay on Jane Eyre, and to get her into the mood she read it aloud to me. I’d forgotten quite how independent-minded Jane is, and how many of her sentiments about not wanting to be beholden to a man for money or status, if couched in slightly different vocabulary, wouldn’t sound out of place if voiced by the protagonist of a modern novel. Then I remembered chick lit, and wondered where it all went wrong…

P.S. My son has just asked me what an onanist is. This has nothing to do with our visit to Amsterdam; it’s what happens when you let your child read books by Jeremy Clarkson.

I stayed overnight with my oldest friend, in her massive house. Her children are always either away at boarding school or travelling somewhere exotic and her husband is a floral designer who has to go to bed very early so he can get up at an ungodly hour and get his flowers, so there never seems to be anyone else around when I’m there. Being accustomed to living in quite a small space with my own family, in London, rather than the countryside, I find the quiet unsettling, and I can’t get used to being able to use the bathroom without having to queue. Then when I went downstairs in the morning there was a strange man in the garden. I hope he was the gardener. The French au pair drove me to the station, and in Waterloo I actually saw a copy of my book on the shelf, which made my day, sad creature that I am.

As I’ve been visiting universities with my daughter I’ve had to suspend the process of phoning round independent bookshops to ask them to stock my book. Although I don’t enjoy repeating the same spiel over and over again, it has been good to speak to people who seem genuinely to like novelists. This is by no means as common as you might suppose in the world of publishing, where the writer often seems to be regarded as a necessary evil. The independent booksellers have all been very polite, have nearly all agreed either to order a copy of the book or at least to look at it, and a couple have suggested I might come and do a reading. A few even had it on their shelves already, in which case I tried not to sound either surprised or pathetically grateful.

The university visits have been a revelation. Much has changed since I was an undergraduate: in Edinburgh we booked into student accommodation rather than a hotel and I thought we’d be roughing it, but in fact it was by far the swankiest place we stayed in. Breakfast was an all-you-can-eat buffet at the end of which you put your trays on a conveyor belt and watched them disappear into the kitchen. In my old university the shop where I used to buy my vodka and Gauloises (they probably did sell some foodstuffs too, I don’t remember) has been replaced by a supermarket that stocks sushi mats. Set against the improved facilities is the sad fact that in most places the tutorial, where 1 or 2 students would present their essays to a tutor each week, has disappeared, and the smallest group of students taught together at any one time is 5 or 6. The relationships people of my generation and earlier often had with their teachers is probably a thing of the past. I remained friends with one of my tutors until the day he died, and although I realised at the time it was a privilege, I didn’t know it was something my children wouldn’t have the chance to experience.

Speaking of children: I ran a workshop on Saturday in the Ideas Store, Whitechapel (for those of you who don’t know, that’s what they call the public library) Given the heat, and the fact that Wimbledon was still on, I doubted that anyone would turn up, but three people did. There was quite an age range – from 6 to early teens – but they all got stuck in. We did a brief warm-up exercise and then began our fantasy stories, but even though I tried to move it along, it became obvious that 2 hours isn’t enough to produce a finished story, and they were just getting to the exciting bit when we had to finish. I’m doing it again next Saturday, in Bethnal Green this time, so I may have to have a rethink before then. It’s asking a lot, though, to complete a piece of work in one session, and I doubt many adults could manage it.

To finish, I’d just like to say God bless Philip Hensher, for his comments about the New Yorker list of young novelists and its possible unfairness to women writers who start late due to family commitments. It’s good to know that someone other than the women themselves has noticed that the baby at the breast is even more of a distraction from work that the pram in the hall. When he added that ‘Novel writing isn’t necessarily something that young people are very good at’ and said that he regretted publishing his first novel at 29 he made at least one old lady very happy.

The Internet is a double-edged sword for people like me – too old to have grown-up with computers, but too young to be able to ignore their potential benefits. One of my friends has just got married for the second time, having met her husband via an on-line dating service, for instance. Not that I’m in the market for a new husband, but I would like to be able to promote myself by ‘increasing my on-line presence’. Instead I sit here, like Tantalus, aware of all the wonderful stuff just beyond my reach.

I’m trying more old-fashioned methods of publicising my book, too. Evie Wyld – whose novel After the Fire, a Still Small Voice is now out in paperback, so buy it, if you haven’t already – kindly provided me with a link to a web site that promotes independent bookshops. Evie works in one of these – Review, in Peckham – and took copies of her book around to as many as she could when it was first published. Being much older and lazier, I’m using the phone. At first I was pleasantly surprised to see how many independents were still around; then it dawned on me how much work was involved in contacting them all. I have to say that everyone I’ve spoken to has been extremely friendly, even though nine times out of ten the person who can make purchasing decisions isn’t there – and you can tell how many are small business, as the person minding the shop is often a friend of the owner. Still, several said they’d order a copy or two, some already had it in stock (how hard I tried not to sound taken aback), one was in a frightful tizzy because Brian May was due to arrive in an hour to do a signing (how unfair is that – he’s already a rock legend and an astrophysicist, why does he need to write books as well?) and one even offered me a chance to do a reading.

Of course, apart from the amount of time it takes, the phone bill will be huge, and when the husband sees it I might need that on-line dating service after all. Perhaps I could kill two birds by looking for a man with advanced IT skills…

Still, someone had to drink all that free alcohol, and I met some interesting people: journalists from South Africa and Sweden, publishers from Canada and the US and a British crime novelist. There was talk of making South Africa the focus of next year’s Fair, but it’s supposed to be Russia’s turn…

My agency was celebrating its tenth birthday and held a party. As usual it was full of unreasonably glamorous people. I really do think there should be some kind of regulation to prevent lovely young publishing assistants standing too close to shabby old authors at events like these. Never mind all these e-book readers – why doesn’t Steve Jobs put his mind to inventing an app to deal with this situation? As soon as one of the L.Y.P.As bore down on a middle-aged female author (and some male authors too, although for different reasons) it would throw up an invisible force-field that would cause her air-kiss to bounce harmlessly off and the dusty scribe would be left to grow morbidly drunk in peace.

On this occasion I gave up trying to make conversation over the relentless boom of the music and slumped at a table where I was joined by a gentleman from New York. I experienced a brief Woody Allen moment as I talked to him, entirely failing to realise that he was an eminent publisher. My agent is on the move again, setting up on his own this time, and I’ll miss the Conville and Walsh parties…

Went to the launch of my friend Jocelyn Page’s poetry collection, Smithereens, which is published by tall-lighthouse. Poetry readings are different from other literary events – there are few, if any, Lovely Young Publishing Assistants, for one thing – and everyone seems to be there because they genuinely love poetry. Perhaps this is because there is even less money to be made from it than from other forms of writing, but, perched on a stool in the basement of Oliver’s Bar in Greenwich, it felt to me as if the atmosphere would have been the same – apart from the cigarette smoke – if we were transported back 40 years to a reading in a cafe in Paris or New York. The same could not be said for most book launches.

I admire poets more than writers in any other form as I think it’s by far the hardest, both in terms of difficulty of execution and the way the poet is exposed to the audience, usually without characters to hide behind. I can’t understand why so many people imagine poetry is easy just becaue it’s short – I certainly can’t do it.

It will be published in paperback next month, and the cover is being finalised at the moment. Having considered a number of designs we’ve come back to something very similar to the one used for the hardback, but in a different colour. In my daydreams about publishing my first novel I didn’t give much thought to the significance of the cover, and now I don’t feel well-qualified to make any decisions about it. If ever I go into a bookshop to buy something I’ll be armed with recommendations from friends and half-remembered reviews from the Saturday Guardian; I don’t browse in the hope of finding something that catches my eye, so I’m ill-equipped to judge which colour would appeal to the widest possible demographic.

Having vetoed a couple of new designs, one on the grounds that it looked good, but didn’t give the potential reader any idea what the book was about and the other because it would have been actively misleading, I’m beginning to wonder whether I shouldn’t just leave it to the publisher to make the decisions…

I’ve finished working on the Encompass project with Spread the Word and miss working with my partners, the writers’ group at Greenwich Association of Disabled People. It snowed on the day of our first meeting and few people could make it to every session, but the work produced was excellent and we printed a small anthology.

Some of the contributors had very little confidence in their ability to write creatively, never having received encouragement, and many were inhibited by their spelling. I made a cardboard effigy of Dr Johnson with a cross through him to sit on the table and explained about his dictionary and how spelling wasn’t always standardised. He kept falling over in protest, but I wanted everyone to write what they felt without having to worry about doing it perfectly. By the end of the project everyone had produced at least one piece that they were happy with.

The aim of Encompass was to get people writing while providing existing writers with training that should help them earn enough money to support their writing habit, but when the project coordinator called me today I was at the checkout in Sainsbury’s, rather than at my desk. She was phoning to ask how many hours of paid work I was currently engaged in per week, and the answer was none. Then she asked me how many hours per week I was writing…

My new distraction is the buddy scheme I’m involved in during the London Book Fair: the British Council asked for volunteers to pair up with visiting South African writers and I put myself forward, not seriously considering that they might actually require me to do anything. I’ve always been the first person in a seminar group to give a paper, despite knowing full well that the first one is always the worst and that all the other members of the group will learn by your mistakes, and I was the first Encompass writer to begin her workshops – before we completed the training, so I still haven’t learnt. I’m the Corporal Jones in any gathering, only slightly less belligerent – and without the bayonet, obviously.

Not that I’m unhappy about it – I think it’s exciting – it’s just that I’m worried that my poor buddy will be expecting a proper writer, and all she’ll get is me. I’m not sure when you qualify to call yourself that – if ever – but I don’t feel I’m there yet.