I had a lovely holiday. Now that rain is lashing down from a leaden sky, it’s feeling like summer was months and months ago. Sniff! I have stuck a few holiday snaps up on the fridge, but it’s not the same!

We went to the Limousin in France which is gorgeously luscious, unspoiled and green. Because I am a sort of bug magnet, maybe even a bug buffet, I got bitten by everything going: one tick, many, many horseflies (ouch!) and then finally a hornet. Now that was one big sting. The beast got me on the side of the knee and I kid you not – a football-sized swelling followed and took days to clear up!

I spent lots of time at my computer writing about New York, which was weird because we really couldn’t have been further from the hustle, bustle and general adrenaline rush that is NYC. But somehow it worked quite well for me.

When we were in New York last year, I didn’t write one single word, because there was too much to do, too much to see and experience.

Now… book news:  The Celebrity Shopper paperback is out next month in a glittery, purple, gorgeous new cover.

New York Valentine comes in January next year. So not tooooo long to wait.

There is now a Carmen Reid page on Facebook, so you can join it and get regular updates. Also, coming very soon, I promise… Annie Valentine’s very own fashion blog. Exciting!

Holidays

If you’re emailing, don’t expect a reply for a few weeks because I’m going on a long holiday to France. I’m taking the laptop and plan to get loads of writing done in the peaceful and (hopefully) very sunny countryside.

But before we get there, there is the holiday countdown to endure. The last two weeks of term are tricky enough with all number of things for parents to remember: Sports Day, Speech Day (times two, as one child at primary, one at secondary), school closing early day, school starting late day. Aaaargh. Meltdown.

Now I am in to phase two: locate passports, EU health cards, organise fish babysitters, plant waterers, buy son new swimming trunks, shorts and sandals, buy daughter everything she demands in shop… and so on!! Laundry, laundry, laundry, holiday, laundry, laundry. No?

I think this is why I only go on holiday once a year. (Thinks enviously of childless couples and their constant swanning off to exotic islands and glitzy capital cities for glamorous mini-breaks.) Not Going To Happen for at least another Ten YEARS!

Tense and nervous?

Don’t you find the first few weeks of the summer holidays always feel slightly delicate for a family? Everyone is getting in everyone’s way a bit. Children and parents are getting used to spending all this time with each other again! Both my husband and I work from home and suddenly we are getting up at 5am or staying up will 2am just to try and find some quiet time. Chores! If you want to make your parent happy just keep on doing those chores!

I got a lovely email from a St Jude’s reader who’d written to me about all the problems and tensions in her family. I told her I wasn’t really the best person to ask, but I gave her my best thoughts anyway and she was nice enough to say they helped.

(This is an extract so as not to give anything about the writer away.)

My experience of being a wife and a Mum is that you do have to keep talking about problems. The more you talk about them and get all those difficult angry feelings out in the open, the worse it gets at first (yikes!) but then you can start working together to try and solve things. And then it does get much, much better!

It definitely sounds like you need to spend some time with your family at the weekend doing those fun things you remember. Even silly things like a game of Monopoly or watching a funny film together will make you feel happy in each other’s company.

I know that when I was upset about things when I was your age, I used to write a diary. Just writing everything down helped me to make more sense of it and find some good solutions.

Think of some fun things you can do with your sisters. Even for 15 minutes every day, so you can all start to feel more connected again. Sometimes, I feel a bit out of touch with my son and we solve that by sitting on the sofa and reading out a book together. Taking turns to do pages with lots of different voices for the characters.

My children love to go on the trampoline in the garden together. They make up lots of silly games out there.

Maybe a little walk now that it’s not so dark at night? Sometimes talking is easier when you’re walking. Sometimes, it’s even easier to talk when you’re doing the washing-up together than when you’re facing each other on the sofa!

Start the tricky conversations when you’re all in as good a mood as possible. Also try to say things like ‘I feel’ or ‘I would like’ rather than ‘you never’, ‘you always…’

Dads can be hard to talk to! Just try moving the conversation on a little at a time. Don’t expect to have one big chat which solves everything (like on the TV!) Just try to improve things a little at a time.

Feeling angry is probably very normal. Thumping pillows, going for a quick walk or run, taking up a really violent sport (karate maybe!) might all help a little bit.

Try to keep cheerful, sometimes things aren’t nearly as bad as they might seem.

Let me know how you get on, loads of love Carmen xx

Congratulations

Many, many congratulations to my Spanish fan Laura Bertolin. She’s translated part of The Personal Shopper into Spanish for her degree project! How fantastic is that? We have had some interesting correspondence about what exactly did I mean when I wrote… ‘gold standard shop assistant’ and so on.  Very tricky.

Names

My Ilford friend Zarah Ahmed, devoted St Jude’s fan, still cannot believe that her name was used for a character in Rebel Girl. But I am always on the lookout for good names! If you’d like me to consider your name or maybe a friend’s, please just post below or drop me a line at carmen@carmenreid.com

Loads of things going on this month as the third Annie Valentine is released: How Not To Shop comes with the chance to win an Egyptian holiday (and if like me you’ve spent much of the summer in Glasgow – you might be needing something like that).

Rush to your nearest branch of Faith and they will give you a special edition of The Personal Shopper for free if you spend over £30 (easily done, I have been on their website and checked those shoes out… and they do big sizes. Gone are the days when you went to any shoe shop, asked for a size 8 and the shop assistant’s eyes popped from her head in astonishment – I’m still slightly scarred though.)

The lovely people at ultra-stylish Scottish Woman magazine have put me on their shortlist for witty Scottish Woman of the Year. I still can’t believe that… anyway, you can find out more if you follow this link. Hey, you can even vote and yes I will understand if you think Ronni Ancona is much more worthy!

Also, give this link a whirl if you’d like to read an interview with me from the Sunday Herald magazine. It’s incredibly nice, Susan Swarbrick was totally charming and no, I don’t have anything on her, she wrote this all of her own accord, honest! ‘Poster girl for yummy mummy chic’ oooh how my husband fell about laughing at that. He knows the grim reading glasses and ratty jeans reality!

Now, which photos can I use to enliven the August blog… I’m still missing New York, so here are another two from the holiday. The big plastic roach key-ring which was the gag of the fortnight: it ended up in everyone’s shoes, everyone’s bed, even Sam’s salad and my birthday presents. Eeek!

Then there are the family birthday cards… obviously cute dogs feature highly as we were all totally missing Jimmy by then!

Secrets at St Jude’s: Jealous Girl went on sale this month. I hope all the New Girl fans rushed to get a copy! Marie Goodwin from E. Sussex gets a signed copy as she was the very first person to send me an email about Jealous Girl. Surprise, Marie!

For the first two weeks in July, I was on holiday. As a big birthday treat, I went to New York with my family and had a truly brilliant time. It was hot, it was hectic, it was very exciting.

We did lots of touristy things, of course: Statue of Liberty check, Empire State Building, check, Natural history Museum, the Met, MoMA, the Bronx Zoo, the Central Library… all fantastic. All totally worth visiting.

Our apartment was weirdly Glasgow-ish: a Victorian sitting room, a little bit brown and shabby-chic, turned into a one-bedroom plus kitchenette kind of thing. It was on 16^th street between 5^th and 6^th and I can’t recommend that slice of town enough. We were right beside 5th Avenue… within spitting distance of Anthropologie, Coach, Banana Republic, J Crew (eek, all shopping accidents waiting to happen) Also the unbelievable farmer’s market in Union square.

When we weren’t eating out, we cooked in  – which Manhattanites don’t –  maybe because cooking attracted the biggest, brownest insect I’ve ever seen. Too big to be a roach, apparently he was a water beetle.

Yes, there were some shopping adventures: I bought my son button-down shirts and his first tie in the slightly fusty, wood-panelled Brooks Brothers (thus fulfilling a Woody Allen inspired fantasy… )

I took Claudie to American Girl Place where our jaws dropped. Not only could you buy a dolly to look like you, clothes and every dolly accessory ever invented (dolly kayak for instance), there was even a dolly hair salon where real, live stylists plaited your dolly’s hair.

I mainly bought shoes, none expensive and all quite devastatingly practical… OK apart from the Park Avenue Princess pumps in furry leopard skin with patent leather trim!

We spent lots of time hanging with the nannies and ‘Hudson Juniors’ in the Central Park playgrounds. Boating on the pond was the best and there were turtles. I found that surprising… what do they do with them in the winter? Fly them to Florida?

I turned 40 (!) and I got a truly spectacular cake. We went out and ate pizzas, played in the Washington Square fountain, walked home up Fifth Avenue admiring the lights on the Empire State building. I counted my many blessings, especially the three I was with, and thought 40 felt pretty good actually.

Right… so, it’s August, and that means summer holidays! Despite my misgivings that our British hols would be two weeks of drizzle and lots of cursing that we didn’t get on a plane to sunnier climes, we lucked out on the weather. So ten of our 14 days in Cornwall were stunningly sunny!

It was beautiful down there: dazzlingly blue and turquoise seas, big waves, long, sandy, deserted beaches. It really is a very special place.

Being brave or foolhardy, I’m not sure which, we booked in for a family surfing lesson. First of all, this involved wetsuits, for everyone. The four of us looked like – remember that kids’ film about the family of superheroes, The Incredibles? Yes that was us, except we were armed with a huge yellow surfboard or giant banana.

It turns out that surfing is quite scary (to begin with, especially if you’re convinced your 6 yr old is about to drown) not to mention exhausting. Muscles I’d never felt before were left aching, but we all worked very hard for our gorgeous surf instructor, yes him of the sea-bleached, tousled hair, a mahogany sea-tan, rippling surfer muscles… I’m sorry, I noticed, I’m only human.

When he referred to my not quite so rippling husband as ‘The Big Fella’ I had to giggle, but I wasn’t laughing quite so hard when he referred to me as: ‘Mum’ !!!! Oh. My. God. That is crossing a line. I’ve clearly got to the age where handsome young men start thinking of me as ‘Mum’. This is deeply, deeply tragic. And I have to say, I didn’t think I was wearing my wetsuit so badly. All that treadmill running had paid off slightly.

I didn’t manage to stand up on my board, but I did do a lot of body boarding which was brilliant. On the beach there were loads of properly old ladies (ie older than me) in suits with board, just grinning from ear to ear. Because it is brilliant fun. This is clearly the secret to a British seaside summer, you’ve got to get in and get wet. Never mind the weather!

Meanwhile, while I was eating pasties and ice cream on Sennen beach near Land’s End, my glamorous sister-in-law was on holiday in New York. Yes, she’s newly single, she’s still child-free, so she decided to book herself a glam singleton holiday to NYC.

Obviously, with the dollar on the skids, everything seemed incredibly good value and she had a very nice little shopping time to herself. Discount shoes, an adorable little Coach handbag and so on.

However, she did report back on a really quite terrifying trend. Every one in NYC carries a beautiful bag, OK, we expected that. In fact, we’d have been shocked if they didn’t, but, here is the but… despite the 35 degree heat, despite the bags and the manicured hands and the incredible designer clothes (smart, smart Prada skirts, nipped in blouses, groomed hair) guess what lots and lots of women were wearing on their feet? High Jimmys or Manolos, I hear you answer and I know, I’d have guessed the same. But no, apparently the coloured, patterned, mid-height Wellington seems to be the footwear of choice!!!! Bizarre!! Is it comfortable to walk about NY in mid-July in calf height wellies? Is it a status statement: I have a really big garden/ allotment/ home in the countryside. Well, whatever the reason… they’re definitely not wearing calf-length wellies for style.

I asked if she at least had a pic for me to post, but she said every time she saw one of these wellie-wearers walk past, she was so shocked, so stopped in her tracks by the sight that she never got it together to take a snap.

Being stared at in disapproval for your fashion faux pas reminds me of being in Paris, aged 19, inter-railing. I was probably wearing a t-shirt, grubby shorts and possibly even hiking boots. This chic Parisisan woman, walked towards me, in the typical Paris outfit of slick, skinny black, smooth hair, sunglasses, and just gave me this look. Her eyes travelled right up and down me and then her face registered this pinched look of horror – making me feel about two inches high.

The last time I was in the south of France, I thought the French women looked a bit frumpy to be honest. All that striped blue and white top business. I mean, it’s quite cute when you’re under ten as holiday wear, but come on!