There are those – probably Mr X amongst them – who think my whole life since having children has been Me Time. Before the advent of Child One and Child Two, I had a very stressful job as a feature writer on a national newspaper, and rarely arrived home before 8, 9, 10. I almost never cooked and I spent my high salary on things like ridiculously expensive leather gloves. I’m not even going to tell you what my handbags cost, I can’t bear to think about it. In a way, I never had Me Time then either, as my soul belonged to the newspaper, or to a lifestyle that I was in the thick of but didn’t love.

Children came and 15 years have passed. Nappy days, happy days. Now, yes I blog, I write the odd article and I’m supposed – ahem – to be finishing novel 2. But there are moments when I find myself alone in the house, with no-one yelling at me to find clean tights/help with chemistry revision/produce food/write 100o words  now. Perhaps I should be cleaning that yickky spot that I know lurks right round the back of the fridge. The cat has been batting cherry tomatoes down there for some time and that really can’t be good. But increasingly I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t just be done with it, acknowledge the fact that I have genuine free time to spend just like everyone else, turn on the TV, turn off my head and watch Jeremy Kyle for a change.

It’s the guilt that stops me. Somehow I still think that if I relax for a moment, the system will grind to a halt, despite the fact that the children the system was designed to support are now off on their own, developing their own systems.

Why do women feel this guilt and pressure to perform, even when there’s no-one watching and not much that needs to be done? Am I the only one who finds herself de-fluffing the tumble dryer filter instead of giving in to my craving for Bargain Hunt? Or are the rest of you slumped on your sofas as I write? Please tell me it’s not just me ….

My publisher was glad I liked my legs but pointed out sweetly I’d have to wait a bit before getting my own copy of the new edition. It won’t be out for eight months. I think I got my German in a bit of a tangle over at www.amazon.de . Even though you might think that a date is a date and is pretty clear in any language, being, ahem, numbers, it certainly wasn’t to me. I also copied in my lovely agent on my email.

My lovely agent then emailed back and pointed out that it would be very nice if I could show her, and my publisher, the odd page or two of the sequel to Schokoherz, which I have now been working on for, erm, two years. Well, that’s working off and on. More off than on, obviously. I’ve had some good excuses. Divorce, emotional turmoil, blah, blah, erm, the weather. And the cat sits on my keyboard! How on earth can I be expected to write under these conditions?

All right, all right, Lady Antonia Fraser managed to pen several whodunnits and a biography while running off with Harold Pinter, and he himself dashed off a play or two while trying to get divorced and remarried. I know this because I was given a copy of Must You Go?, Fraser’s account of her life with Pinter, for Christmas. I am much reassured by the fact that they had twenty or thirty happy years together after the traumatic bit was over. But obviously they were not made of really sensitive stuff, despite winning great cupboards-full of awards for their literary oeuvres, as they just kept on writing no matter what hoo-has were erupting around them. Or maybe they just didn’t have cats sitting on their keyboards?

Anyway, I accept that the time for prevarication is over. I have to show my publisher 35,000 words by April. I’ve written nearly 60,000 already, but unfortunately they are not in the right order. So I’ve absolutely got to get right down to it. A deadline is a very, very useful thing for concentrating the mind, for making sure that the endless evasion is over. I’m going to get on with revising the first draft straight away.

I’m starting tomorrow.

1. You do little sums in your head to work out how many words you’ve already written and how many you still have to go before you hit the target of 500 a day.

2. These little sums get more and more complicated and start to involve calculators, square roots and counting long words as two or, in the case of antidisestablishmentarianism, as three. And that’s a word that crops up surprisingly often in my book. Which is a little odd, as it’s chicklit, not  a critique of the 19th century High Church movement.

3. You find yourself welcoming the Ocado man like a long-lost friend and try to start a long chat with the words, ‘lovely weather we’re having!’. Then you notice it’s raining.

4. The idea of clearing out the cellar becomes curiously compelling. That spider phobia? Yep, it’s vanished.

5. The very act of opening up your novel gives you an irresistible thirst for tea. Then you realise that, whoops, you’re out of teabags and, before you know it, you’re in the middle of Sainsbury’s studying the, erm,  white wine section. Is it chardonnay o’clock yet?

6. You tell everyone not to ring you between 9 and ten. Then, when the phone goes, you leap on it and chat away to the double glazing sales lady. Eventually, she puts the phone down on you ….

7. You spend the whole day on Twitter, telling everyone you’ve got writer’s block. But that doesn’t seem to appy to those 140 characters, now does it?

8. You actually encourage the cat to come and sit on your computer keyboard. You can’t possibly disturb her now she’s settled down. She looks so cute!

9. As it’s raining outside, her little wet paws short-circuit your ancient computer and blow the whole lot up. And you’re glad!

10. You’re just thinking of your 499th word, once the computer mender has left, when you catch sight of the clock. 3.20! Yikes, got to get the girls. Damn, and it was all going so well today too …..oh well, there’s always tomorrow …..