I decided I wanted to be a journalist aged eight for, I’m afraid, flibbertigibbet reason: my best friend’s father was editor of a newspaper charming and handsome and it settled into my consciousness that this is what journalists are like.

Achieving the dream was not so easy. I did a course in journalism and wrote to almost every local paper in the country, watching my male compatriots on the course, slipping easily into employment while I could have papered the walls with rejection letters.

If you didn’t want to write about knitting and cooking (I didn’t) as a woman at that time (1960s) you weren’t wanted. But finally a delightful man, Eric Sly, who owned a court reporting agency in King’s Cross took me on and off I trotted day after day covering the Clerkenwell magistrate’s court and learning much about the vagaries of crime , police work and punishment. A local paper and a provincial paper as feature writer followed. Then two years on a magazine in Holland where I met Olly my husband-to-be.

From there I got on to the Guardian women’s page in the early 1970s and had a brilliant, fascinating baptism of fire, learning to write to their standard (many adjectives were slashed from my eager beaver early attempts) and getting involved in the issues of the new women’s movement which were a personal, political and careerist trajectory.  In due course  wrote a book Hyenas in Petticoats a journalistic charting of feminism between 1968 – 88.

I went freelance when our eldest son was two and a  half having realised I wasn’t a very satisfactory superman juggling all. He fretted at seeing too little of me, and I fretted big time at realising his young life was speeding away and I was  missing so much.

I was lucky. The Guardian had given me a good pedigree, and I got a lot of freelance work for newspapers and magazines. When my second son was born I could prop him up in a bouncy chair beside me while I worked and then we would set off to pick up my first from school. It felt a good balance even if I did sit up until three o’clock in the morning at times, finishing articles about how visiting us and our energetic kids was the best form of contraception for my child-free friends.

But having children gave me lots of material for journalism , family life and relationships.

I began writing books (see BOOKS) which often meant perching in the garden during school holidays typing on my knee while the kids and their friends roared around the garden like screaming banshees. Or holding nerve wracking birthday parties with children and their decibel count filling the home as I piled the table with food which would only hep them up further with all the sugar involved.

At the same time Olly and I had taken on a wreck of a house in London in which we lived, and he project managed the works going on while I escaped as often as possible to do interviews, research in the library and give college lectures.

And now my young are grown up and launched into he world of work. Although to the delight of Olly and me our eldest and his wife and two children moved into the floor below ours in our home and so we find ourselves living in an extended family – about which I have written.

My other son lives with his Spanish wife in Seville which gives us a wonderful excuse to visit that lovely city quite often.

For the rest I sit in my office which Olly designed and had built into the rafters of our home and outside is our beautiful roof terrace with its bamboo, fig tree, olive tree and a lavish hibiscus blooming smoky blue as I look out at it.

It is a good life which has been anchored in place with the frustration, anguish and joy of writing – and all because of my friend’s dashing father I sometimes think.