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…