FOUR years and a few months have gone by since I last wrote a weekly blog and a lot has changed.

I have moved house.
My two little girls are now beautiful teenagers.
The eldest has left school and is working. And my baby boy is now at school.
I have gone from being a full-time mum, back to being an (almost) full-time journalist.
Well, obviously I am still a mum all the time too. It’s just that when you are a working mum you do both at the same time, without letting anybody notice how you do it.

It sounds tricky but it’s a state of mind. You have to adopt a Terry Pratchett-style, parallel universe approach by abandoning all previous limitations on space and time.
Oh, and a few cheap magic tricks also come in handy: especially sleight of hand, and mirrors. Lots of mirrors.
Mostly you just have to trust that everything will come out right in the wash and strangely, so far, touch wood, 99 per cent of the time it has done. Although if I carry on with the washing analogy I would have to admit that a lot of the wash inexplicably disappears mid-cycle, and nobody has matching socks any more and I never do get to the bottom of either the wash pile or the ironing. If you see what I mean…
Although I am very bad with rules generally, there is one, big inescapable rule for modern mums. Nerdily, I find I need to turn to sci-fi once again here. Because Douglas Adams very nearly got it right in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which has the words DON’T PANIC in large friendly letters on its cover. That may work fine out in the unchartered backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy.
But for mums, the words DON’T WORRY should be emblazoned across the kitchen wall. As soon as you let a tiny crack of worry seep in, it’s a long slow slide downward slide into the realisation that a mother’s place is totally and always in the wrong.

If you start to fret about, oh I don’t know, whether they sit all sad and alone in the playground. Or lie awake wondering if they are getting enough vegetables to keep off rickets, say. Then you might as well give up all hope of ever getting a decent night’s sleep again.
This approach is exactly the opposite of multi-tasking. That’s a mugs game which entails organisation, discipline, management skills and lots of lost lists. It leaves you feeling as if you are spinning plates, sure in the knowledge that any second now they will all come tumbling down. It just gets you dizzy, ratty and knackered.

I tried it for a bit and failed. So now let’s just say I am happy to exist in parallel universes. At work I aim never to let home life get in the way. But at the same time I try to make the children secure in the knowledge that I am always there for them, whenever they need me, at anytime of the day or night (so long as I’m not actually sleeping, of course).

Like now for instance. I am trying to write this column on a wet Sunday at the kitchen table and my 17-year-old decides she wants boiled eggs. Four of them.
This means that we have to have the usual discussion about her getting egg-bound, even though neither of us really know what egg-bound means. Which always makes us laugh.
So she puts the eggs on to boil and leaves the kitchen telling me that I can supervise the egg boiling, “because you’re in here anyway”. The fact that I am supposedly working, and try to tell her so, means not a jot.
I might as well say: No, I can’t supervise your eggs. Can’t you see that I’m trying to breathe here (or any other automatic bodily function, like growing my nails, or blinking or digesting my dinner).
Oh, and there is another big change in family life since I last wrote my weekly column.
I am now single.
You would, I suppose, think that the not being married bit was the more important change, which perhaps I should have mentioned earlier. But being with a chef who works meal times, and weekends, and every Christmas, and all the school holidays, for 25 years, it’s often hard to spot the difference. In fact, he had left for a week before the children realised he had gone.

When you are going through a marriage break-up much of it feels as if you are in a really, truly, appallingly badly-written soap opera (except the people aren’t all gorgeous and the weather’s not as nice).
Even now, nearly five years later, I find if difficult to believe it happened to me, to us, to our family. Emotionally it was hell. But the soundtrack and the screenplay were just as universally clichéd, trite and corny as every other divorce.
Don’t ask me how it happened. I have still only been given the very barest details.
But while I now have real understanding and empathy for every other family going through the same thing, I also find I am totally disinterested in the details. They all seem too shockingly familiar and boringly similar.
So, I know all that they say about a woman spurned, and revenge being a dish best served cold, and all that…but I’ve moved on. Ho hum. It was only 25 years anyway…

I KNOW I say this every year, but 2007 is going to be different.
For a start, this is going to be Chinese Year of the Pig, and I was born in the year of the pig, so 2007 has got my name on it.
People born in pig years are, apparently, loyal, strong, fond of life’s luxuries, good friends and, this is the down-side, prone to over-indulge in food and drink.

As I write this, very late on New Year’s Day, I am sitting in the kitchen surrounded by lovely leftovers from the night before.
There’s a hardly-touched chocolate fondue, half a raspberry pavlova, most of a lemon tart and just the lickings of a crème brulee.
(Or that, at least, was how they were when I first started my column. Having a read-through now, everything except the rock-solid chocolate fondue is mysteriously almost gone. Oink, oink!)
As babysitters on New Year’s Eve are impossible to find, I invited all my similarly single female friends and my daughters’ teenage girly friends (and my middle daughter’s lovely16-year-old boyfriend, who didn’t seem to mind being surrounded by women).
One of the advantages of being single is that my similarly-single, female friends are all very good cooks who always turn up for any event ready for the feeding of the five thousand.

We had a scrummy last supper of 2006, but none of us had room for more than a token bit of pud (the crème brulee was the definite winner). We didn’t even get started on the cheese board.
Plus we all had to leave room for copious amounts of fizzy pop in order to see in the New Year in style.
As I live on the hill above Torquay harbour, my house is a great place for Hogmanay. The hills around the Clock Tower create a natural amphitheatre effect and the eruption of cheers at midnight is fantastic. It sounds like Man Utd have just scored, except that the solid roar of sound goes on, unabated for a full 20 to 30 minutes. Add to that the private fireworks being let-off from all of Torquay’s seven hills, and it’s a great show.
Plus any older children can wander in and out of the pubs and clubs and get back home without a taxi.
But the downside is that I had to get up and go to work today after very little sleep, with a bit of a hangover
And after work I had to spend the rest of the day making the biggest Lego knight’s castle in the world, which would have been more fun if my five-year-old hadn’t decided to open all the nicely divided little bags and mix them into one giant 8,788 piece mess.
I cried when I saw what he’d done. First I shouted, but then I cried out of guilt for shouting at him. Because I told him off and said Santa shouldn’t have brought him a Lego set meant for an over-eight year old. What’s wrong with Santa? Is he a complete and total eejit?
So then my poor little boy was so upset at messing up that he started crying and packing it away, telling me to put it in the attic until he is eight. And that was it. He was crying, I was crying. I begged his forgiveness and have since happily put everything else on hold apart from castle assembly and New Year’s partying.
Which is why I find myself writing this right on deadline, sitting at the kitchen table to the tune of the third load of dishwashing so far today. And finding the only cure for writer’s block is eating my way through the contents of the fridge, larder and kitchen cupboards.

So how exactly is 2007 going to be different? I am not about to make any lame dieting resolutions, even though I have just witnessed the total transformation of my sister-in-law who came for a Christmas visit having lost an incredible five stone in the last seven months.
What’s the point in making resolutions when I now realise I can’t help being a pig by nature? Instead I am going to get fitter.
After hearing that we in Torbay come near the bottom of a national league table for not taking enough regular exercise, I am determined to do something about it.
Health officials say the minimum needed to make a difference to health is three vigorous, 30 minute workouts a week.
Luckily a few year’s ago I discovered the perfect sport for me is rowing. Mostly because you get to do it sitting down. Then there’s the total escapism as soon as you leave the beach and turn off your mobile… an hour free from the demands of children, work, life etc.
Plus there’s the social aspect: you get in a boat with four friends and can have a bit of a natter while you warm-up, wind-down and haul the boat up and down the beach.

But most importantly for me, once a training session is booked, there’s no backing out. No excuses. Like most mums, I am not very good at putting myself before the kids, but knowing that the other three rowers (all equally busy working mums) can’t do it without me, I move hell and high water to avoid letting the team down. It’s the only sport since school I’ve managed to stick at religiously.
We had our best racing season yet, finishing a respectable 10th in 2006, but since the end of the summer our cox has been temporarily out of action and we’ve only managed one row. I am missing it like crazy and desperately need to start feeling fit again.
As of today I am back to lunchtime power-walking with the girls in the office; once a week exercise bike classes and winter rowing training. In theory I should be able to squeeze in one gym session a week. But I’ll have to let you know how it goes…

We’ve all got to do our bit if Torbay is going to lose its Couch Potato reputation.
Here’s to a happy and healthy 2007.

A CLASSIC Woody Allen joke goes something like this.
“My ex-wife and I argued over who should get custody of the children…neither of us wanted them.”
Well that’s kind of how I feel. Don’t get me wrong. It would break my heart to give up my kids, but equally I dream about having a couple of days off every other weekend.

And that’s why I am totally confused about this whole superdads phenomenon. You know: the men who hang around outside the Queen’s bedroom window with their knickers outside their trousers protesting about how unfair life is and how their evil ex-wives don’t let them see the kids. I don’t get it.

The real problem in society is that the majority of the single parents in the world (over 90 per cent) are women. And a very high proportion of them do the entire job of child-rearing with no help whatsoever from the fathers of their children. And do we hear them kicking off about this? Talk about the silent majority.

While the fathers for justice are on the news, radio and television (with the lovely but gobby Bob Geldof  doing the articulate bit on their behalf), why do we never hear the other side of the argument?
It’s because single mums are way too exhausted by the effort of bringing up children on pitifuly low part-time wages with no career prospects, and dashing home to shoulder the responsibilities and round-the-clock banalities of child-rearing.
A single mum is lucky to find the time to brush her teeth, never mind organise a day trip to London with a stop-off at Lionel Digby’s fancy dress hire along the way.
You’d have to take the kids with you for a start. And they’d all want matching costumes. And a stop-off at Legoland. The expense! The Tesco vouchers! The interminable trips to the loo!

My lawyer actually laughed in my face when I said I wanted a clause in the divorce stipulating that my children’s dad should have them every other weekend.
Fathers for justice have legal rights to take mothers to court if they want more access, but nobody mentions the fact that the mum usually left holding the baby has no legal rights at all to get dads to look after their children more regularly. How is that fair?

One day (when and if the children leave home), I will protest by climbing some very tall national monument. In tribute to Woody Allen, I’ll be the one dressed as a moose…