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For many years now – twenty and a half to be cruelly accurate, I have been living on a different planet to my peers in the world of commerce. I have been under the illusion that when school stops for summer, so does work. I have read English novels, from PG Wodehouse’s Blandings books through Just William by Richmael Crompton and Rumer Godden’s Greengage Summer, not to mention a tranche of Virago authors including my heroine EM Delafied and Barbara Comyns. They all sell the myth that in the summer we head for the beach. The fact that I have often been up at dawn fitting writing in before taking my children out for a picnic or to a museum ( or nauseum as one of them called it the other day) through all the summer holidays of my life as a mother, has not stopped me thinking I am not working.

But now, in the middle of my life I suddenly find that the beach towel has been whipped off and the naked truth is there. I have had my head in the sand. Everyone else has been at work and I have been making sand castles. So here I am in London in the middle of July and its strangely pleasant. In the sultry afternoons I steal time to read Rose Tremain’s novel about obsessive love in a summer city, “The Way I found her” which is set in Paris, and I remember too the wonderful contained sexual energy of Rosamund Lehmann’s “The Weather in the Streets.” But enough of sex, its work we are here for. Oddly the ennui of being in the city in what I consider to be holiday time makes me wake up early. So I work then. A couple of hours of writing and the day is mine to enjoy.

Yesterday I took my daughter to see the Jeff Koons show at the Serpentine Gallery. We almost had to tie our hands behind our backs so great was the urge to touch these buoyant installations. And buoyant is the word as the Pop Eye Series contains works inspired by children’s’ inflatable pool toys. We loved it, even more when I read the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones describe Koons’ work as “creating a world beyond taste”. I don’t know anything about Jonathan Jones’s taste, but I would bet my favourite knickers that Jeff Koons inflatable dog addling pool on chains filled with logs is much more fun than anything Mr Jones has in his collection. My daughter and I are aficionados of Jeff Koons – we also badly wanted to touch the giant Yorkshire terrier installed outside the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. This creature is made of ‘Oasis” the stuff flower arrangers use and studded with live pansies, and is both monumental and adorable. Stick that in your pipe Mr Jones and see if you can smoke it.

Suddenly realised that despite my new awareness that everyone else is at work, I am still not. Help. Things must change forthwith…………….