Too much to do! The writing, obviously, which I try to do first every day, because otherwise where would we be? But now I’m getting that booking the summer holiday anxiety. Where will we go? What will we do? How can we avoid paying everything we’ve earned for an entire year?!

People are beginning to ask: ‘where are you going this summer?’ Soon will come the sympathetic: ‘Oh, you’ve not booked yet?!’ I’ve been on the websites and it is completely obvious that all the good places, everywhere in the entire world, are already gone!! It’s not even May! Not quite.

And I already know I’m going to look up Greece, California, New England and Italy – all the places I’d really like to visit – and then my family are going to wear me down about holidaying in Britain because they want to take the dog!!

My desk is now a mess… I’m stressing because this is just not how I like my desk to be at all. I like an oasis of minimal tidiness and order. But if anyone can spot my mobile phone charger, please let me know. It’s in there somewhere, I’m sure of it!

Most of April has been very noisy… at least inside the house. For many days there were piles of earth in my living room. There were men digging and shaking their heads quietly, you know, the way men do when something is bad… very bad.

Many, many noisy days later, after much banging and sawing and drilling, much coming in and out of the front door – piles of rotten wood going out and piles of nice clean new wood coming in – many, many days later and we finally have a lovely, glossy, dark, varnished floor. And now that we’ve recovered from the coughing fits induced by the stain and varnish fumes, we can of course smile and say ‘oh, it was so worth it’!

I’m trying not to care too much that over the winter, while we shivered away in our Glasgow ‘project’, our plumber went to Las Vegas and Goa, our painter made a few trips to his house in Spain and I’m sure the flooring guy is thumbing through the holiday brochures right now after the cheque we’ve written him! Oh yes, it’s all so worth it!!

On the bright side, the living room is now floored, painted and ready to move into. I got so excited, I went to the Glasgow Art Fair and had to buy this by the Little Artists: a photo of Damien Hurst and his shark tank recreated in Lego. (015) Genius, no? Almost as funny as my treasured French postcard of a traditional recipe. Poor chicken!

Is it possible not to cry at school services? I know I am just so embarrassing. The Christmas concert was bad enough: shy little baby voices lisping through Away In A Manger… it gets me every time. Blub, blub, blub.

But the Easter service was even worse. The school’s headmistress has been off for months with an unspecified illness and when she was welcomed to the podium by the stand-in headteacher, to everyone’s distress, she was wearing a headscarf.

She told us how much she’d been missing the children and how the wonderful doctors were making her better. But every parent was looking at the headscarf and thinking: this is very bad news.

Her speech made me cry, but then the choir’s angelic The Lord Bless You And Keep You just about finished me off. I’d have come with a box of mansized if I’d been warned.

Still, I wasn’t in quite as much of a state as when my daughter’s nursery was closing down. The final concert of the year was emotionally-charged enough, what with tearful staff hugging each other at every opportunity, but then the children sang Abba’s Mamma Mia.

Now just who thought that was a good idea?!! A chorus of gorgeous little three and four year olds singing: ‘Mamma Mia, did you ever know, my, my, just how much I missed you… oooooh I’ve been broken-hearted, ooooh since the day we parted…’

Heads were turning while I tried to subdue myhowls. Believe me, I’d been feeling quiteconflicted enough about putting my three year old into daycare without that!

April is when Claudie has her birthday. We like a homemade cake in this household, preferably with themed decorations. This year’s request was for a grassy cake with cows!

A day trip to Harvey Nichols in Edinburgh! Yes, I may have had one sister and her three month old baby in tow, but it was still very glamorous.

I got to play Annie Valentine (I am a personal shopper at heart) with the added challenge of entertaining baby while Mummy was in the changing room.

Let’s face it, three months after giving birth is a challenging time and not just on the wardrobe front. My sis is doing brilliantly, in fact, I’m completely jealous of how well she’s coping. I still feel post-natally depressed compared to her and my youngest child is five!

Anyway, she was desperate for new clothes and her hands kept travelling to the shift dresses that used to suit her, so I’d be there going ‘No, no, no! You’ve got boobs, you need a scoop neck now, babes,’ in true Annie style.

‘I’m a size 16,’ she kept wailing at me. (She used to be a perfect 10)

‘Yeah, but not forever!’ I insisted.

In my experience, it takes nine months to grow a baby and get to the size of a bus backend and it takes full nine months to get back again. There’s no point rushing it. Personally, I swear by breastfeeding (nothing hoovers up cellulite faster!) and walking about for miles every day with your baby in a sling. Mind you, I had to do the walking because my babies were only quiet when I was tramping about outside with them in a sling, as soon as we stepped back into the house… waaaaaaaaaaaaah!

We got the sis very hot, stretchy, high-waisted Armani jeans and yes, in size 16, because better to have a pair of hot size 16 jeans that spend the next few months in the kind of shapeless trews she had on at the start of our session. In the jeans, she really did look half a stone lighter straightaway.

I did seriously overhear this in a Hobbs outlet as one assistant uttered training instructions to another: ‘Your customer has got a business meeting in Paris. She’s a size 8 and she doesn’t like brown? What outfits do you choose for her?’

Excuse me while I fall about laughing! Dressing anyone who’s a size 8 for a business meeting is about as easy (and unrealistic) as it gets.

Try: ‘Your customer is a size 14 on a good day, needs clothes she can wear at home, to her part-time job, on the school run and out to the cinema and, by the way, she has no idea what she likes.’ Now that requires a good shop assistant.

Annie Valentine exists (in my head) because good shop assistants not to mention shops full of irresistible clothes are very, very hard to find… a fantasy in fact!