In August 2000, I moved to the UK with my son Matt who was then eight. I came over with a job, but my real dream was that one day I would be a cool, sophisticated, London-dwelling author of bestselling novels. I have failed on the cool, sophisticated and bestselling aspects of that aspiration, but managed to meet the entry-level aspects. I live in London (Zone 4, but it’s still London okay?), and I have managed to publish some books.

In 2003, without the slightest idea what I was doing, I launched into writing my first novel. I’ve often told the story of how I began – I was on a train to a business meeting in Leeds, and the opening of a story came to me. I began to type, and wrote the first 1200 words before my laptop battery gave out. I had a novel in my bag, and I counted the words on a page and did a rough calculation. It was around 120,000 words long. “If I write 1200 words a day,” I reasoned, “I’ll have a book in 100 days.” It was a clunky, simplistic methodology, but oddly enough, has worked for me through this book and six subsequent novels. I still, superstitiously, write 1200 words a day, every day, seven days a week until I have finished a first draft.

The novel I began was This Year’s Black – the story of a woman who gives up her successful career and full life in South Africa and tries to make a go of it in London. We meet her as she goes for a job interview for a temp job, way below her skill level, and we see her struggle to make it in London, a city which is relentlessly heartless to the poor and unemployed.

They always say your first novel is autobiographical, and yes, there were similarities between my life and Ronel’s, but fewer than you might imagine. However while I was writing This Year’s Black, a lot of things changed for me. I left my job, confident that I would find another one quickly. This was very much not to be, and the next six months of my life were some of the most stressful I have ever experienced. Life definitely began to imitate art, and I learned first-hand how hard it is to live hand-to-mouth in a city like this. I (briefly) claimed jobseekers’ allowance (which Ronel is too proud to do), and took any temp job I could get my hands on. I always remember the low point, standing in the toilets of a freezing cold warehouse where I was working in DVD returns, looking at my reflection, dressed in a high-visibility vest, wondering how the hell I had ended up there.

While I was writing the book, I was working wherever and whenever I could and was a single parent to a ten-year-old. The only time I had to write was late at night, after work, dinner, homework, housework and bedtime. On more than one occasion, I fell asleep, hands on the keyboard and my head resting on my hands. I developed back-ache from my nasty wicker and chrome kitchen chair. At weekends, Matt got used to me yelling to him as he watched TV in the living room “Give me a name for a man.”
“How old?” he’d say.
“Twenty-five-ish.”
“Nick,” he’d yell, and go back to watching Power Rangers. Matt has, I think, named a very high proportion of the characters in many of my books in this way.

But through it all, I kept writing. I painstakingly backed up on floppy disks (it was a long time ago), which meant when we were burgled and my laptop was stolen, I didn’t lose a word. I wrote in Internet cafes for a while, until a dear friend gave me another computer to use. I learned, to my surprise (although probably not to anyone else’s), that I am remarkably stubborn. I remember sitting at the kitchen table, late one night, cold and exhausted, desperate to go to bed but still a few hundred words short of my target.
“Who will care if you just give this up?” I thought to myself. “No one. No one even knows you’re doing this.”

“No one but you,” said the tiny voice of stubbornness deep in my heart. My life was in such a mess, in terms of work and money. Other than my brilliant son, this book was all I had. So I propped open my eyes with matchsticks, and I kept going.

I finished it. I eventually got another job, one I absolutely loved, which brought me into the world of books and publishing for the first time. And through a series of fluke events, This Year’s Black found a publisher in South Africa very quickly. “Well, that was easy,” I thought. "I’ll just quickly find a UK agent and publisher and I’ll have cracked this author thing!”

It took me three more books and nine years of slog to achieve those seemingly simple aims – and it was a brand-new book that got me my UK publishing deal. This Year’s Black, after selling reasonably well in South Africa, gaining good reviews and being long-listed for The SA Sunday Times Literary Awards, went out of print and disappeared.

Recently, I decided to take another look at it, and like all writers do, I cringed at what I had written a decade or so before. “I have to fix this,” I thought. I (mortifyingly) didn’t have an electronic copy of the book anymore, so I had to send a print copy away to be scanned in order to get my hands on a Word file. A lot of things have got in the way, but I have finally, finally finished re-editing the book, and will be re-releasing it as an e-book on 25 June 2015.

So much needed to be changed – some odd choices in tense and person, flowery writing, a lot of tell-instead-of-show – and an awful, awful lot of gratuitous sex and swearing had to go. I vacillated about changing the time-frame, as the text is so clearly set in the pre-smart-phone/ broadband 2000s, but decided to leave it as it was. The dates are crucial because of certain political events that took place. Of course, there are still other things I could change, and more editing I could do, but that’s always the case.

But there is something about this book I will always love. It’s the only thing I have ever written completely for myself, with no expectations, no real hope of publication, no understanding of audiences, marketing, publicity or sales. There’s a raw honesty to the writing, and it’s full of memories of the time when I was writing it, living a very different life from the one I have now. It’s a book about a journey, about doors closing and opening, about how damned painful it can be to grow. I grew with This Year’s Black, and I hope it will bring happiness to a new generation of readers.

(I’ve just noticed this blog post is just on 1200 words long. How well-trained am I?)

This Year’s Black will be re-released as an e-book by Oakhampton Press on 25 June 2015

I’m now three days PM (post-Marathon), and I feel I am beginning to understand the experience a little better.

All of the congratulations I have received in person and online have been lovely, but in a sense, I felt like a bit of a fraud: it just didn’t feel like such a big deal. Like so many life experiences which one anticipates for a long time, it was quite… anti-climactic to cross the finish line. I expected to feel some kind of epiphany, or a sense of great achievement. Instead, I just felt like I had been for a very long run.

When I finished the race, we were in a big hurry to get back to the hotel so we could make it to Gare du Nord and get our train home. On Monday morning, it was business as usual: the school run and all the tasks that make up my usual working week. I was a little stiff and sore, but I had no blisters or injuries, and I was perfectly able to go about my daily life. It just felt like I had had a strenuous workout.

However on Tuesday, I really struggled to get out of bed. I didn’t feel any worse physically, but I experienced an enormous mood crash. I felt mentally exhausted, weepy and miserable. It did pass – love and support from the family and a couple of good chats with friends and I felt better. Whether it’s a hormonal thing –the adrenalin of the race and the post-race endorphins leaving my system – or whether it’s just the realisation that after months of preparation it’s all over, I don’t know.

Still, I think that experience has helped me to make sense of my marathon journey, and this is what I will say about it. Running a marathon is 100% a mental and not a physical battle.

I assume that if you choose to run a marathon, you would make use of one or more of thousands of good training programmes and books of advice that are available. What you have to do to prepare is fairly simple: you do the training runs and cross-training to get your body in shape for the challenge. During the race you use appropriate kit, and you keep hydrated and fed. Barring injury, accident or mishap, if you have done this basic, sensible preparation, your body will be able to get you through the miles. I am nearly 47, still slightly overweight and I only started running two years ago, and I did it. It’s not impossible.

It’s not impossible, but it is hard. Very hard, and this is why. Unless you are some super-fit machine, your body will want to stop. For me, running has always been about not stopping, about having the will to keep going for those extra few minutes, up that hill, past that next lamppost. My mind and my will have to fight my body every step of the way. Multiply that by 42km and (in my case) five hours. That is one long mind/ body battle.

The Paris Marathon was fabulous. I was lucky enough to meet up with an online friend from our Couch to 5k group, and being with her in the start-pen and walking to the start-line made a world of difference to my pre-race nerves. There were lots of lovely supporters shouting “Allez, allez, allez!” There were brilliant bands, great vistas of a beautiful city, handsome French firemen cooling us down with sprays from their fire hoses. There were refreshment stands with fruit, water and raisins. But in between, there were great stretches of road or tunnel where I felt entirely alone in the crowd. I had to fall back on my own resources to keep me going. I recited lines from Shakespeare, poetry and songs. I counted steps, promised myself that in 2km I could have another gel. It worked for 35km. I ran steadily, keeping my pace pretty even, and by and large it felt good.

The Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green is a magical place for a day out with the kids... but in some of the cases, there are old toys which are downright sinister. It'd make an excellent set for a horror film. Here are a few toys to haunt your nightmares... 

As I got dressed the other day, and saw myself, unclothed, in the full-length mirror, I had a strange and revelatory thought.

I love my body.

It is the story of my life.

I love the squidgy roll on my waist, which chuckles because I like cake, and I love to fill a table with food and surround it with my friends and family.

I love the new, powerful muscles in my thighs and calves, which sing a song about how late in life, I learned to run, and it has made me strong and free.

I love the feathery lines on my belly and breasts, where it is written that I carried two babies and fed them, and they are growing up to be beautiful, fine young men.

I also love the stern en-dash of my appendix scar, a forever reminder of my own mortality, and my extraordinary luck.

I love the freckles on my shoulders, which map my African childhood and the many hours spent in the blazing sun.

I love the knobbly bunions on my feet, just like my father’s. They remind me that however I may think I invented myself, I am rooted in my family.

And I love the lines on my face, lines written in nights of worry and tears, in hours of fierce concentration, in days of helpless, unstoppable laughter.

Would I trade this book of a body for the lithe, smooth, unmarked and pale page of my youth? 

Not a chance.

I have lots of chapters still to write. 

Okay, confession time. I have never been clear on when to use ‘shall’ and when to use ‘will’. I haven’t a clue about the names of the tenses – what the hell is future imperfect anyway? And I was recently chastised for using ‘imminent’, when I meant ‘eminent’. Oops – and in this very post, I just began my last sentence with a conjunction. Do you know what? I don’t care.




There’s a general assumption among my friends that because I am a writer, I am a – what are the usual terms – ? A pedant? Word nerd? Grammar Nazi?  Anyway, I thought now was as good a time as any to say – I’m not. I’ve had moments in the past when I have shown frustration at what I saw as poor use of language, or a cavalier attitude to grammar and punctuation, but I’ve been giving it a lot of thought recently, and I believe I was wrong. Here’s why.

People who worry a great deal about these things generally do so on two fronts – one: they believe language is being degraded through the use of slang terms, buzzwords, acronyms and text speak, and two: because they object to people who write or speak English without due attention to the rules of grammar and punctuation.

In answer to the first, I give you this quatrain from the prologue to the Canterbury Tales:

“And specially, from every shires ende          
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,           
The holy blisful martir for to seke,            
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.”

What? He can’t even spell Canterbury! And that’s in the title of his book! What’s with the spelling of England? And he uses seke to mean seek, but also uses seke for sick? What the hell is that?

“Ah,” but you say wisely, “That’s old English.”

Well, what we’re speaking now is New English. It’s a fluid language that evolves and changes, and always has. Thank the Lord we don’t have a committee of old men in a gilded hall somewhere, as the French do, telling us what may or may not change about the way we speak and write. Language is a living, breathing thing, and I would argue, it’s an art form, just like fine art, just like music. As human thought evolves, and the world changes, the way we express ourselves changes too. I’m no musicologist or art historian, but I am willing to bet the first time Tchaikovsky played a dissonant chord, or Picasso painted both of the lady’s eyes on the same side of her nose, there were pedants, shaking their heads and muttering. Nevertheless, these changes, and many like them, advanced the fields of music and art, and brave proponents of both forms continue to do so every day.

Yes, some of the changes we see in language may seem to detract from meaning or sense. Yes we are losing some vocabulary. But we are also gaining new vocabulary, news means of expressing a world that has changed dramatically in the last generation– new ways to play with this wonderful, organic and splendid language with which we have been gifted. And if you wish people wouldn’t mess with language, consider that without writers who reject the rules, we would have no “brillig and the slithy toves”, no “snozzcumbers”. No “facecrime”, no Gruffalo.

Which brings me to the second reason people want to be pedants – because they look down on those who are not as au fait with the rules of English grammars, spelling and punctuation as they.  If you are one such, let me hazard a guess. You (a) speak English as your first language (b) You went to school in a time and a place where grammar, spelling and punctuation were rigorously taught and/ or (c) you grew up in a home full of books where your parents were readers who gave you extensive support and informal education. My husband attended an inner-city London comprehensive in the eighties, at a time where the policy in education (or at least in his school), was to exclude all Shakespeare, all poetry, and all grammar. Yes, I’m also not sure what that leaves, but there you are. He was never taught the correct names of the parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on), let alone where to put an apostrophe. He’s often self-conscious about this, and will carefully construct a written sentence so that there is no need for him to use an apostrophe, in case he misuses it.

I recently met a woman through my son’s school, whose first language is Polish. She is a lovely, warm young woman, but I dread speaking to her, not because her English is poor – it isn’t, and it’s infinitely better than my Polish would ever be – but because she is so painfully, cringingly self-conscious about speaking English. She is so terrified of making a mistake that she blushes and struggles every time she has to talk to people. I do my best to put her at her ease and to compliment her on her good English, but I cannot begin to imagine how terrifying it must be to try and learn this enormous, sprawling, awkward language as an adult.

And that’s my objection to pedantry. There are people trying to express themselves, trying to convey meaning, and if you make fun of their efforts, you shut them down. If someone says “Oh my word, you can’t believe the amount of people on Oxford Street today. I nearly got trampled!” And you coolly reply, “Surely you mean ‘number of people’?” You’ve stopped listening to what they said. You’re ignoring their meaning, which is perfectly clear, for a pop at their grammar. Well, whoopee-doo for you. Are you correcting that error because you genuinely didn’t understand, or because you’re scoring a point?

My son is five and learning to read and write. He never ceases to amaze me with his bravery and resourcefulness, with his willingness to have a go at reading the most difficult ‘defies-all-sense-and-every-rule-you’ve-been-taught’ word. He’s started writing stories and his spelling is creative to say the least. The other day, we read the word tree’, and he turned to me and said, “Where’s the ‘ch’?” I realised that for his whole life he’s been hearing and saying ‘chree’. It would be easy to laugh at his mistakes or to make a point of picking up on every single one.

However, I’ve decided to take the same attitude with him to language as I do to play. I will always be there to help and catch him if I can, or if he asks. But I want him to run free, to romp and explore, to trip and fall over a few times, to push the boundaries. I want him to love language, to feel it is his, to own it and use it in new ways, ways that I would never have thought of. And I wish the same for everyone.

English rocks. I am sad it is the only language in which I am fluent, but it’s a wonderful one to have. It is my canvas, my palette and my brushes. Sometimes I will try to create finely wrought works in the classical style. Sometimes I’m going to get in there and finger-paint some rude words on a wall. And sometimes, I’m just going to lie down and roll around in it, because it feels nice, delicious, delectable…. and snurkly.  Come and play.

Just over a year ago, a few months before my 45th birthday, I started running. It changed my life.  I’d like to begin this post with a blanket apology to anyone I have cornered in the intervening months. You will have seen the light of fanaticism in my eyes, and if you had been warned, would know I was about to bore the arse off you by talking about the wonders of my newfound passion.  There’s nothing more exhausting than the fervour of the newly converted – witness new parents, fans of particular TV box sets (Breaking Bad people, I’m looking at you) and people who get a juicing machine.

Anyway, after slightly more than a year, I’m no longer an enthusiastic newbie. As I’ve settled into running and it’s become part of my day-to-day life, I’ve noticed that there are a great many parallels between running and writing. I’ve run around 1200 kilometres. I’ve written roughly one-and-a-half million words. I have so much to learn about both of these pursuits. Nevertheless, I’ve managed to synthesise a series of lessons which I think apply to both – and here they are.

1. There are a hundred thousand reasons why you shouldn’t do it today. They are all valid, some of them are pressing. There is only one reason why you should. Because you will feel better if you do than if you don’t. I guarantee it.
2. The first five minutes are always the hardest. Your body and mind will tell you that this is a bad idea. That you should stop. That you don’t do this. Don’t listen. Keep going. The feeling will pass.
3. You may think you need the perfect circumstances in which to run or write: perfect weather/ time of day/ the right pen or shirt/ absolute quiet/ the perfect location. Bollocks. As you go on, you will realise you can do this thing under most circumstances. I went running on New Year’s Day. I was horrifically hung over. It was pissing down with rain, but I went out anyway. It was the most glorious, exhilarating run of my life. Similarly, I have written good, usable, important work in a text message on my phone while waiting in the car.
4.  There is no governing body that declares you a runner or a writer, no mysterious level you have to attain. If you are putting words down on the page, you’re a writer. If you’re putting one foot in front of the other, you’re a runner. Other runners and writers will welcome you. Anyone that tells you different, and tells you that you need to run at a certain speed or have written a certain amount to “qualify” – well, they have their own issues. Smile, put your head down, carry on. 
5. Go to the loo before you begin. As a writer this stops you interrupting your flow later on, and I also find the act of letting something go somehow makes space for ideas to come in. Don’t ask me why, but many of my best ideas have come mid-wee. As for running, there are gravity issues that come with all that pounding. I’ll spare you the details. Just go. Clear the pipes. You will thank me for this advice. 
6. There is no such thing as a bad run, there is no such thing as bad writing. It may be slow and plodding. There may be mud and nettles. You may feel you didn’t get anywhere. But you did it. And you learned something. Even if it was just not to take that route again.
7. If you are injured, take it seriously. Take time to heal and look after yourself, so you are fit and strong to begin again. 
8. Maybe you’re a sprinter. Maybe you thrive on the adrenalin of racing. Maybe you like to go slowly, all alone, for a long time. Take time to find your pace and your style and own it.
9. A few good friends who are on the same path go a very long way to sustain you in these pursuits, which can often be so solitary.  With the wonders of the Internet, these can sometimes be people you have never met in real life, but they get you, and they will celebrate your successes and commiserate with your failures (C25k-ers, I’m looking at you). 
10. Vaseline. It’s cheap, and there is no better way to prevent blistering. Coat your feet in it, put it under any straps or bands that may rub. I can’t think of a parallel in writing for this, but I had to get this one in. It’s a lifesaver. Might be good if you have a blister on your mouse-clicky-finger. Who knows?
11.  You are not too young or too old. Run while you are young enough to enjoy the spontaneous strength of your body and the sheer joy of moving. Write while you are young enough to be free from self-consciousness and fear. Run when you are old enough to enjoy your staying power and your understanding of the long game. Write when you are old enough to bring a lifetimes’ worth of experience and reading to your work. The average marathon runner is over forty and many people run well into their eighties and nineties. PD James is 93, Ruth Rendell is 84. 

Julia Cameron, in the wonderful, wonderful book The Artist’s Way, talks about the hostility she experiences in teaching people to free their creativity.

People say: “But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/ act/ paint/ write a decent play [or run]?”

Yes… the same age you will be if you don’t. So let’s start.

I was out when I heard, in a cinema full of yelling children, and hardly able to absorb the news. But later, when I returned home, wherever I looked, I seemed to see Alli. Here in the kitchen was the set of glasses she gave me as a house-warming gift when I first moved to London. Here on the bookshelf, the beautiful vintage editions of “Orlando the Marmalade Cat” books she pressed on me for my four-year-old son, the very last time I saw her.  And there were other, more ephemeral gifts – the book title she came up with. The scurrilous and funny stories she told me about her cancer treatment that informed much of the plot of another novel.

But of all the gifts that Alli gave me over a friendship that spanned two countries and twenty years, 
two really stand out. Here are the stories behind them.

We met for coffee in London one day, maybe ten years ago. I was broke, doing menial work to get by, struggling to find a job in my field, my confidence hopelessly battered, my energy waning. Against my will, Alli persuaded me into Liberty the department store, and we wandered around breathing expensive perfume and looking at dresses that cost more than I would earn in the next six months. We found ourselves in the accessory department looking at a glass case full of gloves. “Look at those,” I said, pointing to a pair of gold and fawn gloves. “They’re so classy… not leopard print. What would you say? Maybe jaguar print?” We admired the gloves and moved on, but Alli nipped back without my seeing, and later handed me the beautiful Liberty box, with the gloves wrapped in fine tissue paper. There was no card, no fuss, just the unspoken understanding that sometimes, when you’re on the bones of your arse and your pride is dented and your purse empty,  there’s nothing in the world you need more than a pair of jaguar-print gloves from Liberty. They won’t pay the gas bill, but my word they’ll help you hold your head up high.

The story of the second gift goes back many more years, to 1995, when we were newly friends. My marriage had suddenly and nastily imploded, and after some ugly wrangling, my then-husband had moved out and I was alone with my two-year-old son. I was just barely keeping it together. It’s never the big things that break you though, is it? It’s the tiny things. And for me, it was a trip to the supermarket. We had nothing in the house, so I took little Matt and went shopping. Somewhere in the fruit and veg aisle, it struck me that I was shopping for two, not three, and that I had no idea how to do that.  This realisation brought on the first panic attack of my life. I abandoned the trolley and somehow got Matt and I back home. Of all my friends, I don’t know why it was Alli I rang, but it was. Sobbing, I explained what had happened, and that we were now at home, with nothing to eat. She asked no questions. She simply put down the phone, and arrived an hour later with bags full of groceries. She cooked for us, stocked my fridge, helped me put Matt to bed and let me cry myself to sleep. She slept the night on our sofa, letting herself out quietly the next morning. I think that may be one of the kindest things anyone ever did for me, and I will never forget it.

I cannot begin to repay the value of those two gifts, nor all the others, nor the unaccountable joy of Alli’s company over the years, nor the humbling lessons she taught us all as she battled cancer. She was the personification of wit and dignity and grace, balanced with a kind of earthy honesty that gave all around her courage. I remember when she came to visit me shortly after my second child was born. The contrast between our lives was marked, and I was worried how that would alter our interaction. I had a new husband and a new baby, she had had a mastectomy and was facing many more years of painful and invasive treatment. I had no idea what to say or do. She plonked herself down on my sofa, grinned wickedly and said, “Do you want to feel my tit?” then reached into her bra and hoiked out her prosthesis which she dropped into my hand. “Heavy, isn't it?” It’s hard to feel awkward in the face of that.

She gave an enormous amount and expected very little in return, and now she is gone, I cannot repay her for the abundant gifts she heaped on me. However before she died, I told her that I would be running the Brighton Half Marathon in February, and that I would be running to raise money for Macmillan Cancer Support.
“They've done a lot for me,” she said.
“I know," I said, “That’s why I chose them.”
“Well, hurry up and get a page set up so I can donate something,” she said.

This page was set up too late for Alli to donate, and in all honesty, I didn't want her to. She gave more than enough. But I am asking you to support this wonderful charity, which gives help both practical and compassionate to those who need it most. Much as my beautiful friend did. 

Some years ago, when I still lived in Johannesburg and had a real job, I had an enlightening encounter. Our company had proposed a partnership with a UK organisation working in a similar field. The MD of that company flew to Johannesburg from London, and we held a series of meetings and presentations. I was the lead creative, and the person with whom he would be required to work most closely.

That evening, we all went out for a formal, working dinner. Our main courses were delivered, and as I made a point about our methods to the English MD, I passed him a platter of vegetables. Unseen by the others at the table, he put his hand beneath mine and stroked the back of my hand suggestively. Surprised, I looked up and caught his eye. He stared at me blankly, but kept touching my hand. I smiled brightly, gave the plate a little shove in his direction and turned away to talk to someone else. I didn’t ask him what he was doing, nor did I draw anyone else’s attention to what had happened. I just let him get away with it.

It’s nothing, of course. It’s a nothing, insignificant, inappropriate incident, one of hundreds I have endured in my working life, and very, very far from the most serious and intrusive. And of course, I was right to say nothing, wasn’t I? That’s not sexual harassment, is it? Is *this* the sort of thing those “shrill” women are accusing Lord Rennard of doing? Touching someone’s leg “over their trousers”? What about all those girls, allegedly groped and touched by Rolf Harris, Bill Roache and Dave Lee Travis? Is this what we’ve come to? Is this political correctness gone mad?

Except, if you’re the person being touched, grabbed, stroked or propositioned, the wrongness of it has nothing to do with what the person did with their hands. The man who stroked my hand over dinner didn’t violate my body, but he made something perfectly clear in that momentary, fleeting interaction. While I was thinking about our future working relationship, he was thinking about sex. While I was working hard to present my well-researched thoughts as articulately as I could, he was hearing some words coming out about eight inches north of a pair of tits.

And yes, before the what-abouters jump up and say “but women do it too,” I agree. Sometimes they do. It doesn’t make it right. So if anyone, female, male, gay or straight or any combination of the above, is brave enough to stick his or her head above the parapet and say “I was sexually harassed”, we should listen. As long as we refuse to take complaints seriously, as long as we judge the gravity of an offence on when and where it was committed, or where or how the perpetrator allegedly touched someone, we will fail to deal with the problem.

Sexual harassment in the workplace has nothing to do with where or how you were touched, or what was said. It has everything to do with dehumanising someone, reducing them to the sum of their body parts and transgressing the boundaries of the working relationship. And when the perpetrator is in a position of influence over the victim’s career, it is a betrayal of trust and an abuse of power. Conspiracies of silence and collusion that protect abusers just make it worse. It takes immense courage to stand up to someone and say, “What you said and did was not all right.”

And every time we idly chat about a case, or read a media report which makes light of a sexual offence, or judge the victim for his or her part in it (“You mean after he raped her she went to his house again and he raped her a second time? Well, it isn’t rape then.”), we perpetuate the culture.

Shout loud. Shout often. It’s not “just a bit of fun”, it’s not “banter”. It’s just not okay.

I took a road trip today. I left the house just after 7am, and drove a total of 300 miles, alone. I went to Telford in Shropshire to collect the ashes of my late mother-in-law.

I’d imagined today’s journey as an epic voyage: I packed provisions (well, Maltesers), arranged childcare, and set off before the sun rose, even though I know perfectly well how long it takes to drive to Telford and back, as I’ve done it hundreds of times. Somehow, it seemed epic because it was the last time. As it happened, I hit no traffic, the weather was good and the trip there took a fraction of the time I’d imagined. I wandered around Telford Shopping Centre for a while and even tried on a dress, and then plucked up the courage to go to the funeral home which was in a suburb a mile or so away.

I was inside for a total of about two minutes, just long enough to notice and feel sorry for the family in the waiting room, all standing around in the shell-shocked silence of the newly bereaved. Then the rather perky funeral director handed me the jar of ashes, in a utilitarian, waterproof navy drawstring bag, and I was on my way. I dithered for a while and wondered where to put them, then opted for strapping them firmly into the child’s car-seat in the back. If I’d left them on the front seat, and had to stop suddenly on the motorway… well, it doesn’t bear thinking about, and the hoover would never be the same again.

The journey back was equally uneventful (I stopped for a loo break and a Costa turkey sandwich about sixty miles outside London), and I was home by 2pm. I’ve put the ashes in a safe place, away from curious four-year-old eyes, and I will take them to the church tomorrow, where they’ll stay until we put them in the Garden of Remembrance on the anniversary of her death next week.

It’s a nothing story. Nothing happened today. Nothing momentous. Of course it didn’t. And yet, I had somehow imagined that it would. That somehow, this journey would offer a kind of end, a full stop to a difficult year, and to a time that has been full of pain and inertia. But it hasn’t. This wasn’t Graham Swift’s Last Orders. I didn’t travel with a sage group of friends who could offer the perfect words of comfort. And the one person I needed to hear from was in a plastic jar in the back seat, and couldn’t say them. The trip today is one of the last steps in a twenty-two year relationship, without doubt the most fraught and difficult relationship of my life. And this last year has been the hardest year of it because now she is dead, it’s entirely one-sided.

I remember very clearly the first time I saw Doreen. It would have been in the late August or early September of 1991. I had just started dating a guy, Glen, and he worked in a poster shop upstairs in Rockey Street, Yeoville, Johannesburg. I had gone to visit him at work, and he mentioned in passing that his mum was popping by to drop something off. A few minutes later, we heard footsteps on the stairs, and a head popped up. I saw a short, stocky woman with grey hair and a lined face. She saw Glen, saw me, waved the object she had brought, put it on the ledge at the top of the stairs and left without saying a word.

I’m a writer, and I can’t help turning everything into narrative, and 22 years later, that looks like a metaphor for who she was. Shy, self-effacing, stubborn. I know now what she would have thought: “Glen is busy. I don’t know who that girl is. I won’t disturb them.” But how it came across to me, then aged 22 or so, was that she was just plain rude, or not very interested in other people. It wasn’t the last time we would see the world differently.

We had twenty years of ups and downs. There were some rows, some sulks, some happy times. But I spent the best part of all that time feeling I was failing. That no matter what I did, she thought I wasn’t doing enough. That when she looked at me, she saw the worst of what I saw in myself. Was that true? I don’t know. All I know is that she died before I could stop feeling like that. And I have lost the best part of a year staring into space, feeling sorry for myself and not doing very much at all. Without sounding too melodramatic, it has felt like I had a heavy weight to carry. Sometimes I could shoulder it and carry on. But sometimes I just couldn’t pick it up and keep doing things. It was too heavy.

As I’ve said to friends, in many ways her death has been much harder than losing my own parents (who died in 1995 and 1997). I loved them. I knew they loved me, very much. It was horrible to lose them, but the love felt complete and right, and I could move on with my life, without too many regrets and with lots of happy memories. Not so in this case. I’ve spent twelve months enumerating the ways in which I let her down when she was alive, and even the ways I’ve let her down since she died.

I’ve procrastinated hopelessly about getting a headstone made and bringing the ashes down. Every week for months, I promised myself I would do it, and every week I failed. What would she have thought? That I didn’t care? Probably. Anyway, now I’ve done it, and I don’t feel any different. Will I feel differently once we inter the ashes and put the stone in place? Probably not. Life isn’t a novel or a film. You don’t get to play out a scene that makes everything better, just before the credits roll. I’ll probably continue to remember her, or remember ways in which I failed her, and be floored by it. I’ll also remember the good times, the things she liked, the fun we had. I’ll remember that we took her to the Paralympics in the summer before she died, and she loved every second of it. After a while, I will think of her less and be depressed about it less often. That’s how life works.

So nothing happened today. I completed an errand. I’ll go and make dinner now, and think about the run I plan to take tomorrow, and what to pack for my four-year-old’s school lunch. Life will go on. The weight I carry won’t be lifted by one event. It may erode over time, and get a little lighter. That’s the best I can hope for.

I never thought you’d hear me saying this. Really never. In fact I can’t believe I’m saying it.

But is it time we gave up on feminism?

Not the principles. Not for even a heartbeat would I suggest that. But the word. Yes, yes I know what I’ve said about it before, and how angry it has made me in the past when I’ve heard women say they aren’t feminists. I can hear the muttering and growling already from so many readers, but let me explain further.

This past weekend, I was enormously privileged to attend Blogfest 2013, the annual conference for members of the Mumsnet Blogging Network. I arrived at King’s Place near King’s Cross and walked into a room which can only be described as awash with oestrogen. It was the single most exciting space I have been in in years. Women’s views ruled. In the opening session, journalist Toby Young interrupted Stella Creasy, MP, and tried to shout her down to make a point. The audience hissed.  For once, a middle-aged white man was not going to get to shout the loudest or tell a woman to “calm down”.

The Internet has, in many ways, made publishing democratic.  People can make themselves heard with little more than a mobile phone and an email connection. The gateway to an audience is no longer controlled by a media conglomerate, nor is money a barrier. Good blogs rise and are shared. Social media gives us all the right to reply and express our opinions. This is the first time in history where lucky women have the chance to speak for themselves, and on behalf of those who live in situations where illiteracy, cultural constraints and Internet crackdowns prevent them from speaking.

So there we were, sitting in a room full of women – but not just any women – blogging women. Women with a voice, a voice they claim for themselves. Women who have ideas and carve out spaces for themselves on the Internet: having opinions, shaping opinion, writing, making, photographing. They tell stories, give advice, build businesses and make art. Women who, in my definition of the term, are the living embodiment of feminism, every last one of them.

And then… well, then. The final session was named, “Can you be a ‘mummy blogger’ and still be a feminist?” It was a title sure to cause controversy. Those quote marks around ‘mummy blogger’. The choice of ‘mummy’ rather than ‘mother’, or just ‘woman’.  Why not just ‘blogger’ without a qualifier? And why ‘still’ a feminist? And unsurprisingly, the session soon degenerated, and in the main, it degenerated over issues of semantics. Can you be a feminist and make jam? Or wear heels? Is ‘mummy’ a derogatory term? Is motherhood the full-stop to your life?

And through it all – the shouting, the scrolling, angry twitter feed on the screen that was eventually turned off as it threatened to upstage the action onstage, the sudden and unceremonious exit of the panel, I wanted to stand up and shout at everyone…. “Listen to yourselves! You’re arguing about the meanings of words because you can! Because you have a voice and a forum! You’re all bloody feminists! Every last one of you!”

Except they weren’t. Many, many women in that room were quick to say they weren’t feminists, out loud or later in blogs and on twitter. Several I spoke to later at the drinks said the same thing. And the next day, when I spoke to a friend who is a doctor, and qualified in the 1970s when women doctors were extremely rare, she said it too.

And yet… if you were to ask any of these women if they felt that women should be paid the same as men for the same work, that there should be more equable childcare laws, that women all over the world should be granted education and freedom from violence, rape and mutilation, I guarantee they’d all say yes, and many of them are living those aims or campaigning for them for themselves and others. It sounds like feminism to me, but these women reject the word, because for them it has become toxic and laden with things they abhor, wrongly or rightly. For them it has come to suggest humourlessness, a dismissal of familiar feminine activities and pursuits, man-hating, elitism, middle-class smugness, or as my friend the doctor put it, stridency. One could say it has come to mean a bunch of cross, loud, posh women telling other women what they can and can’t do.

It breaks my heart, because feminism is a word I love with all my heart, but it’s not doing us any favours.  

So let’s ditch it. Let’s ditch this word if it’s standing between us. Does it matter what we call ourselves? We are women with voices, women who want a better life for ourselves, our daughters and sons and, by extension for the men who can only benefit from our enriched participation in society (even though they sometimes don’t see it quite yet). As much as I love the word, I love the principles more, and I love the astonishing women I know who currently feel excluded by it.