This Christmas my three daughters got new Uggs. Those boots were made for flying – they came to London from Australia via Boston USA. This is  because my son, who is a frequent traveller there for business, bought them for £120 per pair less than they cost here. What an Ugging rip off for UK dead sheep on the feet devotees.

On Boxing Day my husband gathered up the girls’ smelly and stained Ugg cast offs from last year,  and dashed into his garage. He keeps a sewing box in there busting with beer bottle tops, magnets, wire wool and needles the size and shape of  bananas.

Several hours later he emerged wearing what looked like a camel’s labia on his head. Only it has funky buttons on one half. He had cut up the boots and fashioned himself the Uggliest hat I have ever seen.

He has been wearing his furry fanny hat when walking the dog and thinks he has a) saved money, and b) made himself look like a handsome trapper. He swears he is attracting  admiring glances.

AND now he is eyeing my Birkenstocks and wondering if he could  maybe make himslef a natty cork visor for the summer months…..

There had better be a lot of high fiving, can-canning, Hallelujah-ing and woo-hooing going on when they are introduced to her……..

I’m not biased. She’s special.

I am distraught. She was never mine to keep but in four short weeks I have come to love this woman with a passion. She cleans my light switches and the four corners (up and down) of my porch. She ungunks our electric toothbrushes where the head fits the body. She hoovers the shoulders of the clothes hanging in our wardrobes and makes a little origami arrow head from the dangly sheet of loo paper.

My husband is also distraught. But for different reasons. He thinks he is married to  a class traitor for revelling in another woman  doing ‘my’ (he means ‘our’) menial work. By loving Eldika so very much I am apparently being unfaithful to my feminist and socialist principles. Of course there has been no mention of the fact that I have been doing  housework highly unpaid for three decades. The last time he was this upset when when he found my secret stash of cleaning wipes. Wipes are the root of all evil dontchaknow?

Eldika is certainly  the Goddess of Mops and Buckets, but at times treats my housework with the same contempt as I do. She wastes a lot of time photographing  our dog with her mobile, watches  £10 worth of QVC as she plumps cushions in slow motion for the best part of an hour,  and her rider is two packets of what she calls ‘King Charlie biscuits’  per visit. Duchy Originals she means.

And I take it as a huge compliment that she loves my new Bobbi Brown lipstick and Prada Infusion D’Iris perfume so much that she never leaves my house without  a generous application of both.

But I can forgive her anything because she drags out the fluff from beneath the radiators and smiles as she’s doing it. That’s special.

Is it really better to have loved and lost?

When my four babies hit the week old mark that was the appointed time  when the waters behind my eyes broke -  I did some champion crying. Those baby blues tears were among the ploppiest I’ve ever shed.

Yesterday I found a new Mum who wasn’t crying, or even just smiling. She was laughing out loud.  And hasn’t stopped since her baby arrived. The reason?  Recollections of what happened in the delivery room immediately after the arrival of her baby daughter when the midwife asked her husband ”Please  get some sanitary protection for your wife.”

The new mum pointed her husband in the direction of her  carefully packed suitcase for labour, it was on a chair just inside the door of the delivery room and contained several packets of sanitary towels –  but he walked past it and out into the corridor.

A few moments later her husband returned. He’d dashed to the hospital shop and bought a packet of Lilets.

And as for that other celebrity babe, Suri Cruise – why is she all over the press in heeled shoes and expertly applied red lipstick? According to her doting Dad Tom Suri does what Suri does – and he doesn’t feel any need to curb her enthusiasm for being the wrong sort of cute for a six year old girl.

It was a golden night. My son and three daughters, now all in their twenties,  are healthy, happy and a feast for the eyes. They raised a toast to ‘Me and Mine’ and declared that  my late Mum and Dad would have been delighted with me for writing their story in such a heartcracking way. That made me cry into my champagne, and my husband  joined in.

 And then the four of them said how proud they were of me, and to belong to our family –  the one we have now and the one that went before us. 

Getting a book deal with the help of  my lovely and super smart agent was sweet. Crafting the manuscript with my exceptional editor was all joy, even when it wasn’t.  And belonging to the bright and buzzy  team at Virago is a great honour.

But - seeing the love and support for me in the faces of my all grown up family last night is the best feeling I have ever known. It  is special in a way I couldn’t begin to write down.  That huge and that special.

There’s a new vegetarian snack on sale in China. It’s called a Not Poodle.

So I found one. £25  M&S. It ticked all my rule boxes and I decided to try it on before I went to bed, when the house is warm and I’d be taking my clothes off anyway.

Bed time was 3am  (I’d been working, finished my book ‘A Quiet Belief in Angels’, watched ’The Good Wife’  and cleaned out the fridge ) and I was in the upstairs hall in front of the mirror wearing the swimsuit and  checking myself from every angle when my husband heaved out of bed and headed for the loo.

Less than half awake  he saw  me in the swimsuit and  his sleep puffed  face lit up.  ”Are we on holiday?” he wanted to know.

I didn’t have the heart to disappoint him so I said “Yes” which is why he turned off his alarm when he went back to bed, and arrived two hours late for work his morning……

The main actor in the show, Tom Hollander, had fallen over a piece of furniture on stage the night before and broken his elbow so an understudy  played his (two) parts. It’s a stooopid story that the cast played out like they wanted to get home early, with jazz hands, bumping bosoms and a lot of incomprehensible  speed shouting. The ice cream in the interval (even though it cost £3 for a tiny one swallow pot) was the best thing about the entire evening.

The funniest part of the night wasn’t my husband doing a starfish impression on the ice, it was when the mood changed in a moment from Christmas to Halloween because one of my sister’s front caps  dropped out. Daughter number three did a twirly point with her finger and said “Oh look! Your tooth’s gone crooked!” and then out it came, along with a blood curdling scream, to reveal an evil looking stump left behind. 

And let me tell you that no amount of Jaeger or Marks and Spencer can rescue you from looking like an old witch when you are missing a front tooth. Tooth in palm my sister called the NHS emergency dental healthline four times that night on December 30th - and ten days later they still haven’t got back to her.