In a Central London hotel room I am communing with positive people. From the stage, a fitness expert leads us through an aerobic warm-up. Star jumps are tough on dodgy knees... Then it's down to the real business. Self-help through group ecstasy - the Billy Graham approach to success. Speakers arrive to a fanfare, extolling the virtues of self fulfilment and wealth. For Thatcher's generation, the one is unimaginable without the other. We're given free books. On how to become millionaires. A woman tells us she can turn us into butterflies. "Leave behind the corpses of your caterpillars. That is your past." I turn to my companion: "She means the chrysalis. The butterfly is the caterpillar." My mate nods distractedly. Inevitably, my mind wanders. Why should elephants have four knees? How long is a piece of string? Would the eccentric who turned down the Fields Medal also have refused a Gracie Fields medal? Finally, it's break time. And there's a competition! To win a whole weekend of self-improvement:-o Heading into the foyer, I celebrate the respite with apple and cucumber juice. My companion is of the happy-clappy persuasion. "I'd say," I venture, tentatively, "that there are better ways of spending a Wednesday night." She scans the room and nods. I have to run to keep up as she exits the building.

A sunny Sunday in Suffolk. My friend's bitser, suitably primped, has been entered at the local dog show. She parades haphazardly with pedigree mutts who trot upright and stiff-legged like City gents. The judge checks her teeth. She bares them and growls. He feels her stomach. She barks. He goes to lift her. She runs away. My friend is not one to give up. Her pooch is entered in four further rounds. For the pairs section, the owner of a large dog of indeterminate origin is invited to partner them. The two mutts stand side-by-side like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny De Vito in Twins. "Did you not realise they had to be matching dogs?" I hiss, as a minging pair of Border Terriers grab the prize. She's nonplussed: "They didn't say." Finally, in the Family Dogs section, there's success. The judge, I suspect, has made a sympathy call. Over dinner we relive the highlights. This includes a timed hurdles over a line of haybales. "They said our little darling was almost a good as a lurcher," my friend reports proudly. Her poor pet, meanwhile, has passed out in the corner.

Closing time at the Windsor Castle pub. Beneath a plate bearing a portrait of Princess Diana, my godson is in full flow: "I want to be naughty!" he bellows. With each round he has consumed a pint of Stella and a large JD with coke. "You know what I really fancy? Going to Sophisticats and doing drugs." I make polite inquiries. The former is a lapdancing club. And he has no immediate access to the latter. Taking my role seriously, I admonish him. "Then tell me what I can do that's bad," he demands, adding quickly: "I don't want to be unfaithful." I doubt he can hold his piece straight enough to hit the toilet bowl during his frequent loo breaks. The liklihood of his rising to a sexual challenge is unlikely at best, and suicidal at worst. I say nothing. But against my better judgement, I let him and his boring IT buddy, come back to mine. "I can't go home to that bitch just yet," my godson says. This is just as well. She's hung up on him twice... "Fuck her," he shouts. I wish you would, I think. It might shut her up. And you. Every fifteen minutes, he goes out for a fag break. And amuses himself sweeping the front window with the yard broom. We have a £10,000 bet on whether it's the original glass... At two, his mate leaves. At three, I call time on my godson. Finally, half an hour later, he lurches off into the dawn: "I need to find a pizza." And to think he was once a choir boy;-)

I have this running joke. I'm a girl who needs 8000 calories a day to keep her figure. It's not quite true, but close. Last week in the wilds of East Anglia - or Angular as Jade Goody once said - the progeny and I were force-fed like pigs being fattened for market. Our hostess, an old friend, is loving and generous to a fault. But she's a control freak. Like Cathy Bates in Stephen King's 'Misery'. Her husband is so infantilised he wears short trousers. He's 62. We were similarly smothered; ferried around the lowlands, stoked up on cooked breakfasts and vast three course dinners. One day we escaped. "I'm taking the girls out for a break," I said. At the front door, we were presented with a picnic. The rolls were labelled with our names. Leaving Norfolk six pounds heavier, I said: "That's it. Family hold back." But we had two parties in the diary. And empty cupboards. So I kept ordering home deliveries. This morning at six, the girls left for Leh. We had breakfast before I dropped them at the Heathrow Express. Back in a silent house, I moped. At ten, I had a second breakfast. Then I worked my way through a box of chocolates called Seven Deadly Sins. One chocolate for each sin: sloth, pride, anger, lust, envy... greed and gluttony. I am exploding out of my trousers. Not so much muffin top as nightmare at the bakery. Worse. Just now, I ate two chocolate medallions belonging to my eldest. "Save them for me, Mum," she said, as she headed off to the mountains. What kind of woman have I become? My child is on her way to the other side of the world, and I ate her sweeties before she'd even crossed Turkey:-(

On Friday we went to visit my aunt. Who runs an alternative centre in East Sussex. The courtyard of her house boasts a circular mosaic, thirty feet in diameter. It's the property's birth chart. The library houses thousands of books on world religions, spiritual guidance and new ways of being. One of the first things we did was stand in a circle and chant the Hindu om. "It sounds like a thousand voices, doesn't it?" she said. And it did. Many years ago I spent a weekend at the centre with UFO hunters. The highlight was a man who claimed to speak to aliens. As we sat there, he went into a trance. Making connections on several planes he passed on fantastically useful messages. For example: "It is cold here." The food was terrible too. This time round there was no cooking. "We're going out for lunch," said my aunt. Curry. In what appeared to be an Italian trattoria. Delicious. We then returned to her homestead for chocolate cake and strawberries. As we munched happily, she said, "I'm going to tell you a story." And quoted, word perfect, Tennyson's Lady Clare. We started off sniggering. By the end, the girls and I were spellbound. My aunt is 81. "She doesn't look any older than some of your friends," my eldest said on the way back. It is true. Maybe there's something to be said for communing with the gods in a rural idyll:-)

Smelly, brown and beautiful, the girls are back in town. This morning I took them for their jabs. Their Pa is hoiking them off to the Himalayas shortly. The youngest went in first, and was being set up for typhoid and Hep A as the eldest and I hoved into view. Two injections were expertly administered. "Over in no time," the nurse mused, moving the youngest to the other side of the room as the eldest took her place. A strangely meandering woman who had spelt Delhi as in telly, she wandered off to top-up on serum. "Don't they look alike? I keep forgetting which is which." My daughters are certainly similar. But one is dark skinned and blue eyed. And the other light skinned and brown eyed. And four inches broader. And three years older... This didn't stop the nurse refilling her syringes, approaching the newly jabbed youngest, now in the opposite corner of the room, and jabbing her again. As we collapsed in hysterics, unable to believe what had happened, she said: "Oh dear. Well it's only the typhoid. She's doubly safe now."

I missed the flight on Friday. Damn the M25:-o The next connection was at 06:00... The silver lining was the SInde commissioning a piece between my visits to Stanstead. The downside was my arrival at the chateau in a valium haze. I bolted down breakfast, disappeared into one of the 14 bedrooms, and slept till dinnertime. Horsehair mattresses! Fantastic! Around the fairylit outdoor dinner table were Swedes, Germans, an English ex-pat, and my hostess - Scottish-Lebanese from Sierra Leone. A number of the ensemble were, or had been, working in Afghanistan. The stories were hilarious. As were the tales of taming the crazed Dinka of Sudan, a trial most recently foist on my mate - a woman in whom they met their match... Halfway through the proceedings, she and her hubby disappeared. To an English neighbour's drinks party. They returned bewildered. "The women said there's a rule and I should have worn heels," she reported. "I told them I wear heels at work. When you're employing a thousand men, it helps to feel tall. At home, it's flatties only." Amused, we inquired how this information had gone down. The owner of the biggest pile for miles, shook her head in disbelief. "Not well. They'd clearly marked me down as a bushwoman with a rich husband."

A new name, a new concept, and suddenly all the pieces are falling into place. I bought a DIY website this morning. And wrote myself a new cheque to freedom, happiness and, hopefully, riches;-) In the middle of this a mate in France emailed. "Are you coming over tomorrow?" I'd ignored her earlier invitation. Because I'm broke financing my reinvention. And I've been out every night since the kids' went. Cocktails don't come cheap. I checked Ryanair and emailed back. "The fares have quintupled. So sorry, Darling. I can't." I finished the website, did some ironing, and prepared to go on the razz. Again. A new email arrived. "We've booked you on the 14.55. Our treat." Seconds later the flight confirmation came through. Gadzooks! My last trip on Ryanair was a nightmare. I had a panic attack on boarding. I felt completely trapped. And couldn't escape because I was. By zillions of people fighting for seats. In the morning, I'm off to the doctor for valium... Wouldn't it be great to always travel first class? My exceedingly good and generous mate, is certainly of that bent. Six years ago she was a single mum in Kilburn. Today she has a multi-million pound business in Dubai and a holiday chateau. Which is where I'm bound. Respect! And a little ooh-la-la, I hope;-)

Entering a Central London bar with my mate, I stopped in my tracks. Ahead of me was a hideously ugly woman. Hitting fifty with huge blonde and ginger hair extensions, she was the sort of old scrubber you'd find behind the bar at The Queen Vic. I clutched my companion's hand and hissed "That's xxxxx - you know, the one who ran off with your mate Caroline's husband." Edging our way around the emporium of delights we ordered drinks. "Hideous, isn't she?" I said, taking charge of a raspberry martini. "You wouldn't think he'd leave Caroline for someone like that." My mate shrugged. "It's her mouth," she said, sagely. "Those buck teeth. Men look at them and think about blow jobs." As I choked on this information, my mate used her champagne flute to demonstrate why men found looking down on buck teeth a turn on. She looked like Thumper wrestling a carrot from the ground. I have never considered the aphrodisiac qualities of a large overbite before. It's always struck me as rather precarious. How can one chew steak, for example? I finished my drink in one. To steady the nerves. Suddenly the object of our musings disappeared. "Gone to steal someone else's husband," I said. "Gone to scrub her knees," said my mate.