I’m not sure whether to say Good Morning, Good Afternoon or Good Evening, because I’ve no clue when you logged on, but I hope you will consider yourself duly greeted. Anyway, I’m delighted you’re here, so hello.
I’ve never thought of myself as a website kind of person, but here I am, joining the gang, and it’s all good fun. As well as being an agony aunt and columnist, I’ve also written quite a few books, and in the later years of my life it turns out that I’ve written enough books to merit the title of “writer” (!) so if you’d like to buy any on-line, feel free. You’ll find details about all of them on the books page.
You can find out all about my childhood by reading Janey and Me but in a nutshell, I was an only child, brought up by two very arty parents in the fifties.
What’s interesting (well, to me, it is) is that my parents were very much in advance of their times. Both of them worked, and I realised very early on that it was not a very happy situation being brought up by people who really preferred their careers to their children. Which is why, when I had my son, I made every effort always to take him to school and pick him up from school and give him a proper family life, even though his father I separated when he was only eighteen months.
Luckily I found a new partner and we not only had a wonderful family life, but I also stayed friends with my son’s father, and am now very fond of his wife and his own new children.
Where am I at the moment? Single, 64, not totally happy (but who is? Don’t let’s kid ourselves. Many more of us wake up in the morning dreading the day ahead than would like to admit) and very, very lucky, in that I have two wonderful grandchildren and I’m still working. Like most people of my age, I don’t fear death, but fear getting old, mad, incapable and gaga.
The years after being 60 have, no question, been the happiest year of my life. That’s why I wrote No! I Don’t Want to Join a Bookclub, a fictional diary of being sixty and a grannie, and I feel really grateful that, for me at least, it does seem there is gold at the end of the rainbow. Well, don’t let’s go mad here. Not gold, perhaps, but certainly not a pile of old rubble. Isn’t that all one can ask?