It’s free, although being Torbay there is the obligatory overly-expensive car park, followed by the equally obligatory parking fine slapped on by the mad, OCD parking attendants.

It’s my first parking ticket of the year and I now know I’m not paranoid.

They are watching me! They hide in bushes, little groups of them and they’re sneaky, so I never see them really clearly, but I swear they look like the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, with giant pocket watches and NCP hats — only bigger, like Harvey.

This time they must have been hovering over my windscreen in Abbey Gardens, waiting for the second hand to pass the hour.

I think I heard them howling with glee and doing high fives as I dashed back to the car park.

I’ve been good for months and months (or mumps and mumps, as my daughter always mis-pronounces it).

I’ve paid every extortionate car parking fee (it must be hundreds of pounds over the year). Sometimes I’ve had to sprint through the town, elbowing old ladies and babies out of my way, in a maniacal, menopausal sweat to get back to the car park in time.

I’ve bought my resident’s parking ticket to be allowed to park outside my own house (thank you, thank you, thank you Torbay Council, how kind).

I’ve had to buy books of £1-a-go tickets so visitors can park outside my house in the parking zone.

And let me tell you, now all my teenage daughter’s friends have passed their driving tests it’s costing me a fortune.

The girls were all blithely helping themselves to tickets in the mistaken assumption they were free.

To make matters worse, if they come for a sleepover they have to use one ticket until midnight, and another after midnight, or they get a parking fine in the middle of the night.

It’s true, the parking attendants must sleep in the drains, with the rats, waiting, waiting, waiting… ready to pounce at any time of the day or night.

When my daughter had her 18th birthday it cost me £2 per teenager per night, just for them to park within walking distance (never mind the fizzy pop, food and fake fur).

I am only allowed 30 of these tickets for the whole year.

I have had to tell my daughter to ration her friendships. Be more choosy, I say, we can only have 30 people visit a year (15 if they stay over).

And that includes tradesmen. And relatives. We must choose wisely.

“How much do we like her?” I ask, whenever she mentions a friend’s name. “Maybe she was OK when her mum used to drop her off, but now that I’m paying £2 a night, I’m starting to wonder if she’s value for money.”

It was lucky my 50th birthday coincided with that one, magical weekend when the council saw sense (did I imagine it?), and all the car parks were just £1 for the whole weekend.

It meant I could invite all of my friends and people could stay over and not get up at the crack of dawn and rush out and stuff handfuls of pound coins into the council coffers (perhaps when all the little Gormleys are gone they should convert the Spanish Barn back into its original use as a tithe barn, where they used to collect wheat in taxes, and just fill it with cash from the parking machines).

OK, I know, I’m exaggerating just a smidgen. But it’s making me laugh. And I know if I get a parking ticket it’s my own damn fault. But I know I’m not alone in this: parking tickets make your blood boil.

I stayed with a friend in the New Forest last year and residents can buy a parking pass for short stops in council car parks for something like £12 and it lasts for a whole year!

The enlightened view is it helps residents and it helps the local economy because people can nip into town.

Can you remember the joys of being able to nip into town? Back in the olden days, younger reader, you could pop to the bank in your lunch hour.

You could park right outside Woolworth’s and rush in for a birthday present. Imagine.

We had shops and free parking right in the town centre, not just at The Willows.

And when I was in Denmark, visitors could have a free permit for short stops in car parks for the length of their stay.

The enlightened view there was it encouraged more holidaymakers. The very idea!

Enough. Enough of my ranting. I wanted to write a nice, appreciative column about all the little Gormleys or, to give this art work its proper title, Field for the British Isles.

I know there has been some mild controversy over whether 40,000 little clay men looking up at you in a room is or is not art.

But I personally found it moving and it made me think, and so it fits my definition of art.

I liked the way they seemed to be waiting and expectant and slightly hopeful: looking up at us humans and holding their breath, as if they believe there is a slim chance we might be on the brink of getting our act together and not cocking up the whole world after all.

The Spanish Barn looks mighty and imposing, as if it’s found a proper purpose again, shaking off the shadows of that nasty fortnight during the Spanish Armada when 397 prisoners were captured and held prisoner there.

On leaving Field for the British Isles, Antony Gormley has also installed a series of ghostly white footsteps, made of felt, which lead from the barn to symbolise the path trodden by the white Canons who built the abbey in the 12th century.

We followed the footsteps and visited Torre Abbey for the first time since its restoration.

Again, if you haven’t seen it yet, it’s really worth it.

The £6.5million, three-year restoration project has transformed it.

I loved the way the new big glass and steel additional staircases and corridors open up the dry, dusty interior without damaging the sense of history.

I have admitted on this page before that, as children, a friend and I found a way into the Pavilion during its disused years, and often used to climb in across the roof to play on the stage and behind the wings.

And now I must also admit my older brother and I used to shin up scaffolding and climb over the walls and run around among the gravestones in Torre Abbey’s medieval cemetery.

I can remember him daring me to lie down in one of the empty graves.

And I have happy memories as a child of Sunday walks with my parents to Torre Abbey’s gardens.

So it was a shock to discover there is no longer free access to those gardens and the magnificent glasshouses.

I had assumed once the restoration was complete, the gardens would be open to the public once again. But you now have to pay 70p to go through the new Abbey entrance.

While it’s lovely to see the gardens looking all spruced up and well-cared-for, as they used to be back in the 60s, it’s wrong that it’s no longer free.

I’ve just experienced the madness that is Glastonbury for the first time — and I loved every muddy minute.

First things first — the toilets. Yes, everything you’ve ever heard about how vile they are is totally true.

There are two types of loo at Glasto. There are the normal portable loos that look like the Tardis (with the trade name which I’m not allowed to use or we might get sued, but cleverly takes the two words portable and loo, and squashes them up to make a new, short word).

As I’m not allowed to use that word, I’m going to call them Portapoos.

There are row after row of Portapoos lined up in ranks around the main stages like an invading army descending the hillside.

There were so many that at first I thought that nice Mr Eavis had got us one each.

And for the first half-day or so the Portapoos seemed the civilised choice… especially when you compared them to the alternative, which were basically giant tanks with toilet cubicles suspended above them. Let’s call these the Tankipoos.

The Tankipoos are painted green metal. And some have big daisies painted on them as if this may help disguise the overpoweringly putrid smell. It doesn’t. Not at all. They are disgusting. But by the second day the Portapoos are all backed up and I have no choice.

To get to the Tankipoo you have to climb up rickety metal steps and open the green metal door and at first glance they look like a normal toilet, with a seat and everything.

In one way I am relieved that I don’t have stand up and look down the hole into the tank. But it’s tricky going to the toilet without looking, breathing in or out, or making any physical contact with the seat.

A friend bought a She-Pee off the internet (it’s a sort of funnel which enables woman to pee while standing upright). But she wet herself twice and gave up.

I used five packets of wet wipes in as many days (and showered once, in the communal Greenpeace solar showers).

Next — the music.

We had one organised day, when we numbered one to eight the bands we wanted to see, and must have walked 10 miles doing it. That day ended right in the middle of 100,000 people watching Bruce Springsteen for more than two and a half hours. It was a truly wonderful experience.

And then we had a day where we wandered lazily around and trusted to synchronicity and everything just worked out perfectly.

We started in the hippy Green Fields and walked up to the Stone Circle. From the distance we could see people letting off paper candle balloons. Every time one floated prettily into the air, a tremendous roar gradually built and spread around the whole festival site.

It looked mellow and chilled out from the distance. But when we got there, I was fascinated as we had to step our way through thousands of young teenagers breathing in balloons filled with gas (out of silver canisters that looked like the ones from a soda siphon).

We ended up dancing to a brilliant band (no idea who) in Trash City until 3am.

And we had one wasted, hungover day when we slipped around in the mud and missed half the bands we wanted to see because we didn’t have the energy to rush around.

And then there was MJ day. It was about 10.30pm on Thursday when a wide-eyed teenager came up and earnestly asked ‘Is it true? Is Michael Jackson really dead?’

We laughed. What a great rumour to spread at Glastonbury.

But we could hear Michael Jackson music thumping out somewhere in the distance and the girl looked distressed and insisted that she had to know if it was true and for some reason she decided that we were the people who had to help her.

I’ve no idea why, because she admitted that she wasn’t even a fan. But that’s the other big thing about Glasto.

There’s this huge hippy vibe. Everybody’s nice all of the time. Wasted and drunk and off their heads and smelly some times — but still nice.

Even the security guards. On the outside they look just as fierce and surly and aggressive as ordinary security guards. But if you ask them for directions, they’re all sweet and helpful and overly protective like big daddy bunny rabbits.

So we stood in the middle of one of the packed metal walkways and asked everybody if they’d heard that Michael Jackson was dead. And within two or three minutes we’d confirmed it was true.

He’d died of a heart attack, which was strange, because the Glasto grapevine seemed to be more efficient than the real news gathering media out in the real world, which took another 12 hours to confirm the story.

As I went to sleep in my tent that night it was fascinating to listen in to all the conversations and hear news being spread the old-fashioned way, from tent to tent, by word of mouth.

That’s the other thing about camping at Glastonbury. You are squashed so close together (imagine the entire population of Torbay all camping together at Cockington) that you can hear hundreds of conversations as you try to sleep at night.

I’m not quite sure why being at Glastonbury when Michael Jackson died had such significance, but it did. Apparently within 24 hours they were selling T-shirts with the slogan ‘I was at Glasto 09 when Michael Jackson died’ or an even more tasteless ‘Jackson Four’ logo.

Suddenly every sound stage was playing his music and remembering the artist before his gradual disintegration into Wacko Jacko.

Over the next three days dozens of diverse acts paid their own musical tributes, all describing how they’d grown up listening to Michael Jackson and trying to emulate his sound and dance moves.

Poignantly the final scheduled event on the main Glastonbury programme was a tribute disco to mark the 50th anniversary of the Tamla Motown label where The Jackson Five started their musical career (with barely-more-than-a-baby, little brother Michael already stealing the show).

The Queen’s Head tent filled with thousands of jubilant festival goers, all determined to celebrate our last few Glastonbury hours and Motown’s 50th birthday and Michael Jackson’s early music in proper party style. We danced and sang ourselves hoarse.

And then we had to take the tent down in a thunder and lightning storm.

I’d packed my coat earlier in the day and was wearing shorts and wellies and got so wet that you could see my pink spotty knickers through my shorts.

But the good news was that we got to the car before the crowds (nobody else was stupid enough to take their tent down in the rain) and got off site with only a half-hour traffic queue.

It was a weird and wonderful experience. And I’m hoping to go back next year.

With my older girls it was easy. They always asked me questions from an early age and I answered them as fully and honestly as I could. It all seemed very healthy and straightforward.

But my son is eight and was still putting his fingers in his ears and running away whenever the subject came up.

Then a few weeks ago he came home from school looking troubled and, in a slightly disgusted voice, told my new man they were going to be doing sex education at school saying, hopefully, ‘You don’t think mummy will let me do sex education do you?’ and looked downhearted when he was told ‘Oh yes, I expect she will’.

The next day he came home with a letter from school and told me he wanted me to sign the form excluding him from sex education lessons.

I can’t remember his exact phrase, but he used the word ‘inappropriate’, which just doesn’t sound right, coming from an eight-year-old.

So at bedtime I decided it was time we had a long chat and, despite him still insisting he didn’t want to know, I told him about sex.

Obviously I didn’t want to jump straight into the bodily functions stuff. But I think I may have lost his attention somewhere in my preamble.

Then there was the normal amount of giggling whenever I named body bits and eventually he seemed to take it all pretty matter-of-factly, without much comment.

Except that when I got to the end, he was still insisting he didn’t think I should be letting him do sex education in class.

Something was bothering him and it took me a while to work out exactly what it was.

Then finally all became clear when he said, ‘Yes, but what am I going to have to do in sex education?’

No wonder the poor child looked so concerned. He thought there was going to be some sort of practical element to the lesson. It made me remember a particularly funny Monty Python sketch with John Cleese playing a teacher demonstrating sex with his naked wife in front of a class full of bored teenaged boys, who are all yawning and looking out of the window and sneaking peeks at their Latin grammar books.

After I told him he wouldn’t have to DO anything, apart from try not to giggle too much, he went off to bed perfectly happily.

But the next morning I thought I’d just double check whether he now felt he understood the basic facts. He shook his head.

So we had another chat and he said, wisely I thought: “I can see I’m going to have to wear a lot of protective body armour when I’m bigger.”

And then, just to be sure he had finally understood, I told him one last time exactly which bit went in which hole and finally it seemed to dawn on him. He looked doubtful and said: “It must take a lot of complicated manoeuvres to get to that stage.”

That’s one way to put it.

But it did make me realise that he’s been playing too many war games — body armour, complicated manoeuvres — it sounded more like we’d been discussing military tactics for Call of Duty than love, sex and relationships.

My older daughters and I were trying to remember if they had had formal sex ed at primary school, and we couldn’t remember.

Maybe that’s because it wouldn’t have seemed much of a big deal to them.

I do vaguely remember a friend who had two little boys asking to go into school to see the sex ed teaching material before agreeing to her sons joining the lessons.

At the time I couldn’t really see why she was so concerned. But now, seeing the huge difference between my own three children, I do wonder if the classroom is the right place to teach young children about sex.

However carefully the lesson is handled, there is often no telling what’s going on in children’s heads. The same words can mean entirely different things to each of them, and my son certainly came home with a few very confused ideas.

IN complete contrast, it’s been my middle daughter’s 18th birthday.

She’s just finished her A-levels and is probably off to university in September.

I am immensely proud of her and will miss her like hell when she goes.

But in the meantime we had some celebrating to do.

Coming of age has more to do with getting legal ID to go out clubbing than the key to the door nowadays.

She decided it would be fun, as her birthday was a Sunday and a bit of a quiet night on the town, if she and all her friends went out in fancy dress.

The theme they hit on was cave women. Off we went to Percy’s in Newton Abbot and bought metres of fake fur.

They all came around for a barbecue and spent Sunday afternoon creating Barbarella-meets-One-Million-Years-BC cave girl outfits.

They had been upstairs for about an hour when I went to check on the progress of the costume-making. Apart from a mountain of mess on the floor, and one skirt, they weren’t getting far fast.

I remembered I’d made my oldest daughter a similar outfit four or five years ago and sure enough (she never throws anything away) we found it and used it as a prototype.

The easiest way, we discovered, was for the girls to stretch the fur around them and hold it in place, while I sewed them into the outfits.

It was working fine, they looked great. But the problem was that I was dressed in jeans and they were all skimpily dressed. The sun had graciously decided to shine and I was boiling and wanted all the windows wide open, while they insisted they were freezing.

In the end (I had had a glass of champagne with the birthday cake by then) I decided the answer was for me to strip off too and wear my other daughter’s old cave girl outfit.

I must point out the costume fitted her when she was about 15. She is only eight stone and a size eight now. And she was smaller then.

Let’s just say it’s lucky fake fur is stretchy.

Despite that, it was preposterously minuscule. It (and the champagne) made me giggle.

You must also realise I was under a certain amount of strain by that stage, given that the occasion meant spending the day with both my ex and my new partner.

It was all very grown up and civilised (well they were, I was completely juvenile), and only slightly odd now and again.

Probably the atmosphere wasn’t helped by the fact I was running around dressed in little more than fur undies.

Given that the girls’ costumes needed so little fabric, we were left with a remnant large enough to make a Fred Flintstone (possibly more Barney Rubble) style off-the-shoulder costume for my youngest son.

I wanted to get a photo of all of us together in our cavemen outfits, and so I was still wearing my disgracefully revealing, ridiculously silly outfit and making his last costume as the other partygoers arrived.

I had to breathe in a lot and probably looked a bit of an arse, but it was fun.

The girls, meanwhile, looked stunning and had a lovely (and legal) night on the town.

And while the motor industry the world over faces a drop in sales of nearly 40 per cent over the last year, this particular car is reporting record sales.

The Cozy Coupe sold more than 457,000 units last year (compared to America’s second bestselling car, the Ford F series pickup, which registered barely a third of that number with 143,717).

What’s more, the car is stunningly ugly and only comes in one colour: red with a yellow roof.

And its top speed is only as fast as your little legs can power you (unless you happen to push it down your steeply sloping driveway, as my girls did on many occasions).

My older two had something similar (see pic atttached) which used to spend far too much of the year getting in the way indoors, crashing up and down the hallway. I was glad when they grew too big and I could finally ditch it.

But because of my spectacularly bad family planning, I found myself buying another one 10 years later for my son. Maybe because he didn’t have a little sibling to push around, he never seemed to have quite so many near-fatal adventures (or as much fun) as his big sisters did.

Sales of the Cozy Coupe in the UK have been holding up as well as in the States, with some four million shifted off the shelves since it went into production 30 years ago.

“We’re delighted to be at the top of the UK car sales league table in our 30th anniversary year,” says Ron Brawer, managing director of MGA’s Little Tikes.

“Cozy Coupe delivers on design, fuel consumption, safety and fun.”

In common with today’s trends, the Cozy Coupe also comes ready-pimped in bright pink for Barbie lovers.

Younger generations only remember the awful footage of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, killing all 14 crew members.

How can it be possible, they ask, for the technologically-challenged, hippies of the sixties to safely land people on the moon?

I can see why they’d rather believe that the whole thing was stunted up on a Hollywood film set.

Most of the calculations were worked out on chalkboards. The average wrist watch nowadays has more advanced computing technology. And the only thing stopping these men from burning to death was an exciting new wonder product called Teflon (now saving your eggs from sticking to the frying pan).

Yes, it’s incredible. And maybe you had to be there at the time to believe the madness and bravery and of the space race.

The whole thing was based on the childish, competitive, brutish stupidity that was the Cold War. America and Russia took all the world’s resources and intelligence and pointed them in the same direction — for a few crazy years the only thing that seemed to matter was getting to the moon first.

If it was a stunt, it was a very long drawn out one, which lasted throughout most of my childhood.

Between 1961 and 1972 we spent weeks and weeks gathered around little black and white TV sets, or with our ears up against the radio, trying to follow the latest development.

My older brother, like every other boy of his generation, was obsessed with facts and figures about the latest Apollo mission and would bore me endlessly with every detail. He had a wall chart showing where the spacecraft was each day.

And the reason we were mesmerised was that those astronauts knew (and we all knew) that their chances of survival were based on a wing and a prayer. There was no health and safety mentality in those days.

I’m not knocking health and safety: factoring out the imminent threat of death can only be a good thing.

But back then the world was a dangerous place. My father used to have a 1960s green Austin Mini van and we would use it for holidays and family days out.

That meant mum and dad in the front, with the baby safely held on mum’s knee (no seat belts) and us older four kids all bumping around in the back.

On one memorable occasion when my grandmother was over from Ireland, she came too — along with my aunt and my five cousins, and their Corgi dog. That was four adults, 10 children, a dog, and all our picnic stuff for a day at the beach. In a Mini van (when Minis were miniscule — our van was about the same length as a Smart car). Never mind seatbelts, we were squeezed in so tightly that getting enough oxygen was more of a worry.

I think that kind of devil-may-care mentality about safety puts the Apollo missions into context.

The astronauts’ families watched knowing that the chances of them getting back alive were slim.

At take-off, the world held its collective breath. We knew that at every docking procedure things could go fatally wrong. And when we saw Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, everybody was well aware that these might be the last pictures of him alive.

It was that raw bravery and spirit of adventure that made every little boy want to be an astronaut.

And there’s another factor that moon landing doubters don’t take into account.

Our modern-day reliance on computers is actually a reason why space missions became more dangerous, rather than less.

Those nerdy-looking Houston boys had to rely on old-fashioned brain power and an obsessive, compulsive attention to detail, checking and double-checking every calculation, testing and re-testing every piece of equipment, rehearsing every moment of the mission until everybody knew their part, however small, and everything ran like clockwork. That precision is something that’s been lost.

Computers make complicated calculations so quickly that it is difficult to imagine mathematical theorists and scientists taking years with chalk and blackboards, using pen and paper to do the same job.

Everybody knew that lives would be jeopardised by even the tiniest human error. So it wasn’t allowed to happen. And computer error wasn’t even born.

They say if you remember the sixties you weren’t there. But if you were a child in the sixties, the one thing you remember above all else was the day man landed on the moon. If you don’t believe it happened, perhaps you had to be there.

Or it would have been, if it wasn’t for the small detail of a divorce.

I know. You’re all shouting ‘Get over it’ at me. But it’s OK. I am over it. In fact I was so over it last year I wanted to organise a Not My Silver Wedding Anniversary But Why Not Have a Party Anyway Party. And would have. But it was a Wednesday.

No, the reason I mention my very happy non-anniversary is ‘Poor Guy’.

In case you missed this Tuesday’s paper, let me explain. My colleagues this week played a dirty rotten trick on fellow columnist, poor Guy Henderson, by waiting until he’d left the office and doctoring his weekly page.

The week before was Poor Guy’s silver wedding — a real one (he’s still married, to the same wife, and everything!) — and he’d written in his usual funny, self-deprecatory style about how awful he’d looked in the wedding photos with his big 80s haircut and moustache.

He also claimed the pictures had been lost forever.

But that’s the problem with writing a confessional column. You have to be scrupulously honest.

I think what Guy meant to say was ‘I wish they had been lost forever’. And having now seen the offending pic, I can see why.

He looked like a cross between a bent copper in Life on Mars and one of the Village People.

So of course, certain evil (male) colleagues and family members did everything in their power to unearth one of the offending photos and, in the true spirit of journalism, publish it for the world to see.

As a fellow columnist, who identifies with the perils of baring your life and soul weekly, my sympathies are all with Poor Guy, who is now plotting his rightful revenge.

And as today, June 11, would also have been my anniversary, I thought I’d dig up my wedding photos before anybody else does.

One of my main memories of my wedding day was how much I hated my hair (silly really, when you compare it to Guy’s).

The problem was that a friend, who was a hairdresser, had kindly offered to do my hair for free.

She curled it and lacquered it hard like a helmet and stuck on the silly head-dress thingy. I felt like a Lady Di impersonator (I have just been told that the French call her Lah-di-Dee, which is great and how I shall pronounce it from now on).

But this was an hour before my wedding and too late to change the horrible, not-me hairdo. So I politely thanked her. I was a sweet, well brought up young lady in those days.

What I really wanted to do was burst into tears and rip out her eyes, screaming that she had ruined my special day.

I want to say that as I’m all grown-up and in touch with my emotions and trained in the art of self-assertiveness, things would be different nowadays.

But I know that really I’d still smile and say nothing.

The thing which strikes me most, looking back at those photographs and the memories they bring back, was how terribly sensible I was then.

Nowadays I tend to think of myself as a bit of a dipstick. And most people seem to agree.

Yet I had decided at the age of 23 that it was a good time to buy property. And because of that I decided it was also a good time to get married (not exactly romantic, but we’d already been together for seven years by then, so I kind of thought I might as well get on with it).

I was right about the property (if not the marriage bit). We bought a three-bed semi for £27,500 and sold it three years later, after a few licks of paint and with new central heating, for just under £60,000.

Long before I was 30, I (well we, strictly speaking) owned a detached house at Maidencombe with a third of an acre and a little orchard.

Nowadays your average 23-year-old is more likely to have a £25,000 student loan and overdraft than a mortgage and their own home.

And one of the reasons for the bad hair day on June 11, 1983, was that I was determined to do the big church white wedding thing (off-white — not brilliant, virginal-white, obviously) on a small budget.

Almost everything was home-made or donated (dresses, cake, photos, car, hair). And students did the catering at a big old house which we rented on Dartmoor for the day.

Coincidentally, the same house — Colehayes Park, at Bovey Tracey — was in the news last year when more than 2,000 teenagers turned up there after a teenager advertised her party on Facebook. And even more coincidentally, one of my own children was among the fancy dress partygoers.

And even more coincidentally, the photographer was a young Herald Express trainee called Martin Keene, who left us to go off and work for the Press Association, where he spent a good part of the next few years trailing around after Lady Di (or Lah-di Dee, as she’s now known).

Now looking back at the wedding photos I realised my hair wasn’t so bad after all (although it looks more normal in the going-away pics, after I’d brushed all the lacquer out).

And what also strikes me about this photo is how devilishly handsome my father looked. I’ve worked out he would have been almost exactly the age I am now when he gave me away.

I remember just as he and I got into the wedding car, a little girl passing in the street made my day when she grabbed her mummy’s hand, pointed at me and said, ‘Look — it’s a real princess like Lady Di’ (Lah-di Dee).

I eventually cut up my wedding dress and made two identical little party dresses for my daughters, complete with matching blue sailor collars and sashes.

The girls were about six and four, but when I tried to dress them for a Christmas party, my eldest daughter steadfastly refused to wear hers.

I was going to say she had a tantrum over it, but that would be a lie.

I had a tantrum over it. The dresses had taken me weeks and weeks to make. I had cut up and sacrificed all the John Lewis silk taffeta in my beautiful Lady Di (Lah-di Dee) wedding dress to make them.

For once I decided I was not going to back down. We had such a horrendous, stand-off, screaming match that both of us still remember almost every word 15 years later. I’m sure that everybody who lived in Maidencombe at the time still remembers it.

She tells me now that when we got to the party she went straight to the toilets with all her friends and they all stood and looked at the offending dress and agreed it was disgusting.

It took me a long time to learn, but eventually I realised that it’s not worth fighting with kids about what they wear.

For one thing, they may turn out to be right about our dodgy fashion sense — as anybody looking back at photos of themselves from the 70s and 80s now knows!

My son’s Torquay primary school last year introduced a fortnight’s holiday, rather than the usual week, during this spring bank holiday half term.

In theory it means you can take a holiday at a different time to everybody else and not have to pay the vastly inflated school holiday rates.

But we can’t go away as my older daughter is studying (or trying to, rather half-heartedly in the heat) for A-level exams, which start next week.

So we’ve had a week of day trips, mostly down to the South Hams.

In my holiday mood I decided to buy myself a good book, and rather optimistically picked up a 941-page translation of Cervantes’ Don Quixote.

So far I’ve skipped through the intellectual translator’s notes, got bored with the heavyweight academic introduction, been puzzled by the prologue and unable to fathom the poems and sonnets.

Finally I sat down on the beach at Blackpool Sands, under the sun brolly, about to read Chapter One, Part One of the Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha.

I read two lines and my son interrupted me. I was glad of the interruption. It was too hot for reading (we couldn’t even walk over the shingle without our shoes on).

So when he asked about my book, I did one of those parent things of using it as an opportunity for an educational discussion while he sat patiently pretending to be interested.

We’ve recently been reading his Shakespeare for kids books at bedtime and I started telling him Shakespeare was writing in England and Cervantes was writing in Spain at the same time (did you know that, spookily, they died on exactly the same day?) and that they are considered to be the founders of all modern fiction, and that some people still think they are the two greatest writers of all time.

“Really,” he sounded surprised. “But what about Dr Seuss?”

I forget he’s only eight some times.

But we got into another discussion about how Dr Seuss really is a literary genius and about how boring children’s books were when I started school in the mid-60s.

I blame my early dyslexia on Janet and John.

I can clearly remember that during my first few weeks at school I loved the Janet and John books.

What I loved about them was the artwork.

These two children lived in a wealthy parallel world, where the sun always shone and the parents were both happy and everyone dressed in a different primary colour.

It somehow made you feel nostalgic for the present, while you were still living through it.

But my love affair with Janet and John didn’t last.

The thing nobody thought to explain to me about books was that you had to look at the words.

I looked at the picture of Janet and they said ‘Janet’ and I said ‘Janet’.

Basically I thought you were supposed to look at the picture and memorise a phrase. And since they were all profoundly boring phrases, like ‘Janet has a ball’ or ‘John has a ball’ it was easy.

This went on for a few months. My memory was great. I was doing really well at reading until somebody covered up the pictures.

It took me about two years to catch up. And that meant going back to the beginning and having to learn letters and re-reading those horribly boring stories about stuck-up, middle class, goody-goody kids, in their big sunny garden, with their glossy-coated Labrador who never did anything.

Not even fighting each other or scrumping for apples or getting flashed at in the park.

I could see that the Janet and John books made for a mildly entertaining memory game, but as far as storytelling went, they were a disaster.

I was only five and they bored me to tears. Where was the plot? What was the motivation?

When I first saw a Dr Seuss book, with its lovely cartoon pictures and funny, easy-to-read rhyming story, I too thought the man was a literary genius.

If I’d started out with Dr Seuss I wouldn’t have all this middle-aged bottled-up anger to deal with. Possibly.

I’m hoping that I will be a late starter with computer technology in much the same way as I was with books as a child.

My problem is that I need to see the whole, big picture in order to understand the simplest little thing.

So, as my new love is a bit of a technical whizz, I have decided to try to reclaim the missing chunks in my IT knowledge by asking him a continuous stream of ridiculous questions every time I have to use any piece of modern technology.

So far he’s been very patient, but I fear his patience may be wearing a little thin.

This week he’s been in seventh heaven because he’s got himself a new iPhone and after three or four days I cuddled up in bed and said: “I’m jealous of your new iPhone.”

And he replied: “Yes, it’s amazing isn’t it.”

“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I’m jealous of it. I’m starting to think you love it more than me.”

Alarmingly, he didn’t dismiss the idea.

He takes it to bed! He’s constantly playing with it. On the beach, in the pub, first thing in the morning, last thing at night.

He knows what’s happening everywhere in the world, all the time.

The iPhone can tell me the weather in Barcelona, if there are any late trains arriving at platform two at Taunton station, who’s winning the Grand Prix and if his guitar is out of tune.

Every conversation starts with the words: “Do you want to see my newest application on my iPhone?”

Isn’t it clever? Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t it useful?

Now he knows I’m jealous, he’s started kissing it goodnight.

But American novelist Ayelet Waldman has just published a book of essays called ‘Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace’.

She became an international focus for the bad mother debate — and was booed on Oprah — after writing an essay about sex and motherhood in the New York Times.

And now she jokes that to earn the title ‘good mother’ she would need to perform an emergency tracheotomy with one hand and calmly change a baby’s diaper with the other. I think the problem’s worse than that. A woman performing life-saving surgery while changing a nappy is more likely to be condemned for bad hygiene than praised for being supermum!

She says that for dads, it’s the opposite problem. They only have to hold a child to win praise. Her hubby, the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon, was queueing for a cup of coffee with their crying baby on his hip one day when he was tapped on the shoulder and told he was a good father.

In a similar way I was at Meadfoot Beach café on Sunday morning and watched a dad exchange a few brief words with his daughter and it warmed my heart: the way he cupped the back of her head in his hand and called her ‘chicken’ really charmed me.

This isn’t a sideways dig. I’m not saying that men in general are feckless idiots. I’m actually surrounded by some really spectacularly good dads.

Even my ex, while he may not live with our kids, still gives them huge amounts of time and attention and love, and they love him to bits.

My own dad was a great father — not in today’s hands-on parenting style, admittedly, but when we were little he was always kind and gentle and, the thing that seemed most important of all at the time, funny. You know how they say there’s no such thing as a new joke? Well for me there’s no such thing as a joke that my dad didn’t tell me as a child. I’ve heard ‘em all.

And my new partner is a wonderful dad to his two 20-something daughters, still continuously involved in every step of their lives as they move into the working world.

So why is it that we (I mean women mostly) are so happy to acknowledge good dads, yet have set the bar so impossibly high for ourselves.

Back to Waldman. She says: “I think that we are in such in state about motherhood. It’s so, so sad that we find ourselves condemning each other rather than letting everyone just get on and live their lives. The best way I can describe it is as this almost toxic self-loathing, this desire for self-flagellation about whether or not you are a good mother. I used to think it was just an American problem, but judging by the emails I get and talking to other people, it seems to be spreading across the globe.”

She got into the bad mothers debate after writing frankly about her ‘torrid’ sex life with Chabon.

Maybe other women thought she was boasting a bit (he’s not only hot property in the publishing sense, but pretty hot in the looks department too).

One of the ways we working mums survive all the juggling is by convincing ourselves that nobody’s supposed to have it all. And here’s this woman with brains (ex-Harvard law school, former federal defender, successful novelist), a career which allows her to work from home, four young children, a hubby with a Pulitzer… it’s somehow just not right that she manages a steamy love life too.

It all sounds blissfully perfect. But judge not. In her new book, ‘Bad Mother’, Waldman is just as unflinchingly honest about her own bi-polar disorder, the couple’s heartbreaking decision to choose abortion when they discovered their unborn child had genetic abnormalities and about her 11-year-old son’s ADHD.

The article that really got her into trouble contained the claim: “I do love (my children) but I am not in love with any of them. I am in love with my husband,” adding: “If I were to lose one of my children, God forbid, even if I lost all my children, I would still have him, my husband.”

It was like an incendiary device. People demanded her children be taken away from her. She had hate mail. She was attacked on the popular daytime TV show The View, booed at on Oprah and called everything from ‘a freak’ to a ’self-obsessed bitch’ on websites.

But you see, I personally can’t see anything wrong with what she wrote.

The love we have for our children is supposed to be a different sort of love to the love we have for our partners, surely? She’s not saying that the death of a child wouldn’t be too bad. She’s clearly saying that if one died, God forbid, she’d have the support of a loving husband to carry on.

It’s just more of that ‘a mother’s place is in the wrong’, ‘toxic mum’ syndrome.

She’d have faced just as much approbation if she’d written the opposite — that she was ‘in love’ with her children. Now that would be kind of freaky.

Part of the problem is that the English language only has the one word for all different types of love. When the Scandinavians talk about romantic love in English, they have to say ‘falling-in-love, love’.

I identify with Ayelet Waldman’s Bad Mother conflict. As a mother you protect your family. As a writer you have to tell the truth. You can’t do both.

So the easiest way is to write about your own flaws and your own fallibility and accept the Bad Mother label.

Really we know we’re neither good or bad, just the same as everybody else at the moment — trying to work out new ways to be parents, getting the work-life-children-sex-money balance right.

Hopefully our children will learn from watching us, and not judge us as harshly as we judge ourselves, and get their own parenting right.

But actually, that’s a lie (not about sleeping around) because I like a bit of housework now and again, when I’m in the mood and have the time.

It’s a kind of therapy… like gardening or writing this column.

The reason I brag about being a slummy mummy, in the same way that I’m always joking about being a bad mother, is that I have to make choices — just like every other working woman — and the one thing I happily choose to drop is the illusion of being perfect.

Housework or sanity. Sanity or housework. Hmmm…. let me think for a minute. It’s a toughy. Because there are moments when, frankly, insanity and a bit of time-out, locked up somewhere soft and quiet, in a drugged-out haze, does sound like a bit of an option.

So the house comes at the bottom of my list of priorities, most of the time.

However, last week the new man in my life offered to help me do something I haven’t attempted in all my years as a single mum… decorating.

He turned up bright and early, with dust sheets and massive power tools. And as soon as we started I remembered why I’ve avoided it for years.

The plan was that we had four days with no work and we were going to decorate the hall and porch… that’s three floors, two landings, eight doors, windows, bannisters, the lot.

I must first tell you that just before I moved to this house, four years ago, I heard a female comedienne telling a concerned friend that she couldn’t have children.

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” the friend said. “How sad. Why is that?”

“Because I have white carpets,” was the reply.

Well, I too have white carpets. In the hall. But I also have three children. Can you think of anything more stupid?

The sensible thing would have been to get rid of the children. But my ex and I fought over who should have them, and I lost.

Over the four years the white hall (walls, ceiling, paintwork, carpet, everything — it’s like a padded white cell nightmare) has become gradually greyer, muddier and badly chipped.

You know how some sad people preserve tiny baby shoes or footprints in plaster or bronze? Well I don’t need to. I had my children’s imprints permanently displayed over every surface in the hall.

Or I did. Until last week.

For some reason which I now can’t quite fathom, we decided that the easiest option was to re-paint it all white. I think I got into the paint section at the DIY superstore and had a panic attack.

But I did what I always do when I am having a panic attack. I remain outwardly icily calm. It seems to fool people most of the time.

I did not like to admit to the new man in my life that, actually, choosing paint is something that I really need at least five or six months notice on. So I acted as if I thought white would be fine.

The next bit was easy. Big long rollers, smooth surface. Twelve hours later, lots of cups of tea, a takeaway dinner, a sick child totally ignored on the sofa, and all the walls and ceilings were brilliant white. It looked great.

The problems started on day two. As I didn’t want to admit that choosing a new colour was too difficult for my small brain, I decided that I wanted the woodwork to be white.

But not brilliant white. I liked the subtly off-white colour of the existing woodwork.

I went back to the paint shop on my own to get 10 litres of white satinwood.

I couldn’t find any, so I asked the assistant.

Now it’s hard to imagine the absurdity of the following conversation unless you’re standing in a giant warehouse surrounded by tins of paint from floor to ceiling (remember the bit at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Where they hide the ark of the covenant in a storage hangar full of boxes that goes on into infinity. Like that).

Basically, I’m surrounded by millions and zillions of litres of paint. And I ask the assistant for white paint. And she says: “We don’t do white paint.” I get the giggles. She scowls.

They have brilliant white, she says. But not white. Not in satinwood. Not in a big tin. She says I’d have to go to their bigger store in Exeter for that. Or up the road to a paint specialist.

I go up the road to the paint specialist. He says Crown only do brilliant white satinwood. But Dulux do just white. (It may have been the other way around, but whatever). It costs me a fortune, but I think ‘Hurrah for the paint specialist. Nice to see a man who knows what he’s doing’. I go home.

We paint the woodwork. It takes three days. It’s actually not white. It’s brilliant white. I feel conned.

But never mind. Now the problem is that because middle of the house is so bright white, everything else looks dirty… especially that white carpet.

I had planned to finish decorating and get it cleaned. Except that, as well as the muddy footprints and tea stains, it now has splodges of non-removable, white paint all over it. Help!

A lovely picture of a man sailing a giant aubergine across Ghent harbour advertises the new campaign.

When did Belgium go from being the world’s most boring country, to the place I’d most like to visit?

As soon as I mentioned the boringness of Belgium in the office I was shouted down by colleagues who started telling me things they love about the place.

One was instantly aroused by the memory of an ex-girlfriend’s handmade lacy knickers from Belgium and another said that this year’s Eurovision song contest entry from the country is an Elvis impersonator.

Another brightened up with the memory of a drunken weekend in Belgium with 100 firemen.

But back to vegetarianism… starting today, Ghents 5,000 Elvis-impersonating civil servants and lace knicker-wearing elected politicians have agreed to eat only vegetarian meals.

Schoolchildren will follow suit with their own ‘veggiedag’ every Thursday from September. It is hoped the move will cut Ghent’s environmental footprint and help tackle obesity.

Now I’m not quite sure why this all excites me so much. As a vegetarian for 25 years it really, really, really doesn’t bother me whether other people eat meat or not.

I mind a bit when they apologise for eating meat in front of me (why would I care — it’s not as if its one of my relatives or pets they’re tucking into?)

I do mind if people put raw meat in my fridge though. I just don’t like the smell. I’m OK about sweeping up the blood and guts which the cat brings into the kitchen most mornings, but he has the good grace not to put it in the fridge.

And it does upset me a bit that people make assumptions and wrongly categorise all vegetarians as radical, animal activist, health freaks.

Obviously I care about global warming and world poverty, but I don’t think it’s my job to convert anybody else.

Maybe it’s purely selfish, because it means that at long last there will be at least one European city I can go to on holiday and not have to survive on wine, cheese and bread for the entire week.

While I was in Spain last year I went into one tapas restaurant where every single thing on the menu had fish and meat in it somewhere. I told the waiter not to worry, I’d just have wine and olives for my dinner. But when he brought out the olives I realised that they were stuffed with anchovies too. He was so embarrassed that he ran down the road to ask for a dish of olives from a friend.

But now Ghent is leading the way. It is one of 370 European Climate Cities, and apparently they may all join in the meat-free day.

The participating cities are going to get cafes and restaurants to provide at least three veggie choices on the menu. I know that might not sound very exciting to the rest of you, but it will be lovely for me to be able to go into a restaurant and be able to do the whole ‘Mmm, let’s see, what shall I choose?’ thing, rather than …’I'll have the veggie option’.

But I don’t think it’s all going to be plain sailing. I looked on Ghent’s website and there are only seven veggie restaurants in the whole city. They’re going to be packed on a Thursday.

And I’m hoping that the city’s school dinner ladies are better at veggie cooking than the ones in this country. All three of my children have tried school dinners at one stage or another — mostly because I get so fed up making packed lunches.

A whole generation of little Belgians could be put off vegetarianism for good unless they teach their school cooks how to make tasty meatless dishes.

While on the subject of Belgium, my son was convinced in his first year at school that Jesus’ mum was called the Belgian Mary (he used to have a bit of a hearing problem).

He was only about five at the time and no matter how much his sisters and I insisted, he was still sure that he was right and that the Madonna was really called the Belgian Mary.

I remember getting into a very long discussion in which I tried to explain what a Belgian was. And then another one where I tried to tell him, without going into too much detail, what a virgin was.

I realised that I had failed when he looked at me and said: “Does that mean you’re a virgin mummy?”

That was about two years ago, and when I asked him about the Belgian Mary this morning it was clear he still doesn’t know what the joke is.

Today he asked me if a virgin is a type of religion.

The problem is that he’s now as confused about religion as he is about sex and, what with me talking about virgins and Jesus’ mum in the same sentence, he has now truly mixed the whole thing up.

The religion thing got confused when he was set a piece of homework where he had to ask friends and neighbours about their jobs, and what religion they are.

Unfortunately that weekend we had an odd assortment of visitors, and none of them could answer in black and white terms — or in any way that made any sense at all to an eight-year-old — about their religious beliefs.

I do feel very, very sorry for the poor child living in our nuthouse.