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This is a last ditch procrastination moment – Friday afternoon in the studio, the sun is shining hard, the purple Indian bedspread that is my curtain is casting dappled shade, and I have the horrible spectre of a printer at home that I haven’t connected to my computer.

Mission of the month has been buying and setting it up – and the buying was painful enough – down in the darker reaches of PC world where all the computer equipment looked like bigger or smaller toasters and it was hard to get excited about making one my own.

The printer though is the modern equivalent of the sharpened pencil for the new school term, and in a baroque way I feel I have really gone back to school this autumn. I have just begun my 2009/10 stint at Burlington Danes Academy for First Story and completed my first session with a group of Year 10 children this week.

We begin cautiously with a discussion about the books we love to read, and as I am trying to bribe my daughter who is 12 to read at the moment I am fascinated to hear what London 15 year olds are into.

Wuthering Heights, Of Mice and Men, Othello and Holes are all hitting the spot at the moment, and before I can say “Blow me down with a feather I thought you would all say Katie Price” - they turned the tables on me and asked for my favourites, so of course I head straight into Tolstoy – how I love Anna Karenina and War and Peace. And as I explain, getting onto my favourite riff about Natasha and the Borzio’s hunting in the countryside, I realise I am dangerously out of touch.

A modernisation programme commences and now I am reading AM Homes “This book will Change Your Life” and the eccentric novel “Important Artefacts and Personal Property from the collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris including books, street fashion and jewelry” from a life which looks like an auction house catalogue, with a couple of china poodles on the front which give more than a nod to Jeff Koons.

This book is life changing, in a quiet way, in the way lives need to be changed. Eat Pray Love did the same job; sometimes a book, or a painting or a piece of music just shifts the sensibility a little, allowing a moment of meditation to create a new outlook. “Important Artefacts…” charts a relationship, nothing more nothing less, in pictures of objects which belonged to the couple and the descriptions and prices of these items. The film rights have been bought by Brad Pitt, and it is to be published by Bloomsbury this autumn – don’t miss it, lits price less. God, inspiration is everywhere – my friend Liza’s significant birthday requires a portrait, I shall render her in oil wearing her false eyelashes. As thick as a draught excluder, ( I mean the eyelashes not Liza – she is a goddam genius) she said wearing them was like having mini umbrellas on her eyelids, so maybe I will make the picture more surreal than for real…….

No excuses are left, its time for me to draw the time line for the new book I am writing and begin the process of turning chaotic ideas into ordered prose – ceaselessly turning the words to make them into something papatable, it reminds me of primitive man cooking on a spit.

And of cooking – MORE - last night I saw Aga launch a vivacious spotty Aga customised by Emma Bridgewater and like a giant crusie ship the spotty Aga set sail through Knightsbridge on a voyage into the heart of any home. Emma Bridgewater herself spoke straight to MY heart when she said the only collaboration that could possibly have made her happier would have been one with Emmy Lou Harris or Johnny Cash, though as my 12 year old daughter quickly pointed out – even quicker than Emma – he is dead and gone. A man I wish I had met.

Aga is a force of iron, and seems to bring a touch of the unique longevity shown by Ursula Andress in “She” but no fur bikini . 300 years of Aga cooking pots and almost 100 of the machine itself. In spots, or with cup cakes or in tartan as well as plain eau de nil and purple, the 21st century Aga is going to give boring cookers a real run for their money. And I know who I want to win.

Next week I am sure blogging will have become second nature. Well, that’s my aim….time to pack the last suitcase of the fresher and send him off with a cheese grater and a tin of cocoa to the cliff tops of Sussex east slope. I know I will cry so much………….I mustn’t let him see though.