I’M ON holiday from work this week and can’t believe my luck — it’s been hotter here than in Barcelona.

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.

I THOUGHT this nagging feeling that, whatever I do, I’m a bad mother, was just me.

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.

I LIKE to brag about the fact that I’m a bit of a slut — in the good, old-fashioned, slovenly housewife way, not the sleeping around kind, obviously.

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!