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The watershed came a week ago on Friday. Or the dam burst, or any wet analogy involving chaos but also change. Whatever. On Friday I realised I had to start my book all over again. I have been writing it since April. I did a lot of cursing, a bit of weeping, foot stamping and gnashing of terrible teeth like the Wild Things (I wonder what the movie will be like Where the wild things are) and took to my bed in the manner of Barbara Cartland. She wrote her books from a pink powder puff boudoir, or dictated them, but she was definitely in bed. I too was definitely in bed as I began to write the book again. Hey ho, the only way out of the hole is to write myself a ladder up to the top and to climb out and get back on my feet.

In some respects I am patting myself on the back; I have grown up – if we don’t count the wailing and Wild Thing gnashing - and become more mature in my working approach. The book wasn’t working. Action was required. The last time this happened, I didn’t reach the moment of awareness myself, it was reached for me when the book was stolen, or rather, my lap top was stolen and I had no back up for the 30,000 words I had written. Nor has I sold it to my publishers. The deal crumpled away to dust, I was so shocked I couldn’t remember what the book was like anyway, and trying to re-write was hopeless – like driving a car with flat tyres. The situation was a potential gas oven one, and I lay on the children’s trampoline in the garden and cried for about 3 weeks.

So this time, a Friday afternoon in bed, the distraction of some truly delicious apple polenta cake I invented in a bastardisation of a River Café recipe, and plodding back to page 1 all seems like new improved behaviour on my part. Why the book had to behave so badly I am not sure.

Actually, I do know, because I like making bonfires, and I made a classic mistake. I put too much on or rather in, and when the sparks did not take and set a flame through my prose, I kept adding more – more characters, more action, more ideas, but I hadn’t got the core of the thing. So now I have taken everything off and begun with some very dry twigs, a very few bits of kindling and a small but strong flame. It works with fires so please God let it work with the book...

Distraction is fundamental to the novelist and mine are becoming ever more baroque. I have a trip to Brighton, a night in Manchester and a few days in Marrakech at the AIM festival in November, to keep me away from my desk. Last week at Sketch there was an achingly fashionable party for the Moroccan Arts festival. I realise now, having turned up in a subtle yet chic black number, that the way to be noticed is probably to keep on the yellow council worker jacket I have for bicycling and the helmet which looks like a Hoover filter, and to clutch the tyre pump like a giant cigar throughout the evening. At best I will look like an installation by someone very cutting edge, at worst I will be in the carbon caring circle of those who care.

Actually, there is another way to be glamorous and apparently eco among the film makers and bee keepers, artists and t v presenters attending the festival, I could wear the really princess like shiny cherry red taffeta skirt from Cabbages and Roses who make eco friendly clothes. I am not sure how, but presumably all the buttons are happy . I saw the skirt, like am emblem of freedom in a picture of a girl sitting on a fence like a bird about to migrate for winter, and I liked the spirit and the fact that it reminded me of going to parties when I was 15 and inhabited a dazed fantasy that my life was about to explode into a new reality of a Jilly Cooper novel – not the bonk busters, but the earlier ones with girls names. I wanted to be Imogen or Harriet so badly. Maybe the beautiful skirt will help me time travel now back to the early eighties and the world of Bananarama our 2009 fashion seems determined to recreate, even the less good bits. If it does, I shall put it in the new version of my book. Et viola – making the most of things is the motto for me this week.