I originally wrote this with Cyril in mind. I was trying to get across what life is really like in England. I'm still not happy with it. I don't feel I've succeeded, but I suppose it's a start.

If my husband’s with me, I fall asleep quickly, then wake at dawn, dozing fitfully. When he’s not there it’s ages before I fall asleep, but once asleep, it’s hard to wake up. My husband works away from home right now and only comes home at weekends.

If I get up any time before 7.30am, that’s okay, but after that I feel self-conscious about being late for work, even though no-one clock-watches my arrival.

I have three children at high school. Sometimes we fight over who’s turn it should be in the bathroom, but usually there’s some kind of order to our timetable.

I usually shower. Sometimes I have a bath, depending on how much my neck is bothering me. It locks up frequently. A bath is better for my neck.

I make a packed lunch, otherwise I’ll snack too much from the vending machine at work. There’s too many high-calorie chocolate bars and crisps in there. Fatal for anyone on a diet.

I live about five miles out of town on a very quiet estate. I normally catch a bus to work. They come at the end of the road every 20 minutes. They’re nearly always either five minutes late or five minutes early. The fare is cheap if you buy a seven-journey pass, 70p per journey into town.

I have a full clean driving licence, but I hate cars with a passion. I hate car drivers even more. Ten people a day die through road accidents in Britain, and if you drive, it’s not hard to figure out why. Car drivers are the most selfish people on earth. They’re so used to having their own way they can’t be bothered to slow down for anything blocking their path, such as a bicycle. So they take chances, and overtake with only the tiniest margins for error.

That said, I still haven’t quite given up a vehicle of my own. I have a motorcaravan that I use for emergency trips. She is 16 feet long with a 2.3 litre engine. When you put her in reverse, she goes beep-beep-beep. It has to be an emergency for me to use her. I only drive on perhaps four occasions per month, usually at night, to pick up a child from somewhere. If there were more buses in operation after 6pm I would happily stop driving altogether. But at least no shitty car driver is going to mess up my life if they crash into my motorcaravan. She has a certain presence on the road.

I can arrive at work any time up to 10am with no questions asked, but I normally arrive between 8.45 and 9am. I work as a production journalist on a local newspaper. I am desk-bound all day, sitting in front of a computer screen. I design pages, cut stories to length, check for legal, spelling and grammatical errors (I’m not too hot on the grammatical stuff) and write headlines and captions.

The office is open-plan and it is noisy. About 50 people work in one half of the floor, another 50 or so are due to arrive in the next two months. I used to work nights. Only about 25-30 people are there at night and our security guards are obsessed with switching off the lights to save electric. Once I was using the toilet, and someone came in and snapped off the switch, leaving me in pitch blackness.

Staff who meet the public are supposed to dress smartly, but we desk-bound design folks are a scruffy bunch. I usually wear jeans and a T-shirt. Ten years ago I always used to always wear a skirt and blouse for work and wouldn’t dream of looking casual. But on nights, no-one cares, and after a long spell of working nights I’ve become too set in my ways to change them.

The noise of the newsroom is constant with the ever-present hub of people talking, phones ringing, televisions permanently on, and the hum of computers/air conditioning. At our sister paper in Norwich, there is absolute silence. People talk in whispers. Weird. Weird. Weird!

I normally have about a half hour lunch break after 2pm, when I do some food shopping, then leave the office between 5.30 and 6pm. It takes about 45 minutes to get home. In a car, it would probably take less than 15 minutes.

When I get home, I start cooking dinner. On Mondays, when I arrive home later, I leave out an easy-cook meal like pizza and chips for the kids to do. The rest of the time it’s a potatoes and two-veg effort, mainly, interspersed with the odd pasta dish or salad. My family aren’t fussy eaters.

We eat together in the dining room, sitting round a falling-apart table that has a piece of chip-board on the top to make it larger, and decorated with a pretty lace tablecloth. We rent our house. It’s large and has four-bedrooms, but it’s semi-detached. We are currently selling our other house, but the buyers are in a chain and it’s taking a while to sort out.

By the time we finish eating, it’s probably 7-7.30pm. I collapse in front of the television. The kids all sit with me, and I only bother to clear the dishes away after 9.30. Every mealtime I always eat too much. God knows why. I can’t understand it. But if I don’t overeat then I don’t feel as if I’ve eaten. I waddle around with an overfilled stomach for a bit, but at least that way I don’t snack all evening.

Recently in the evenings I’ve spent most of my free time on the Net, though I know I shouldn’t, because our phone bills will rocket, and the kids moan at me because they feel neglected. They’re a good bunch. Two of them seem happy and settled right now, with plenty of friends, backchat and bickering between themselves. The third is quiet and a bit of a loner. When we’re together, and when Stewart’s here, there are many times when we all curl up in front of the telly and watch a film together. When we discuss decisions like whether to move house, or where to go on holiday, we always talk about it together, all five of us. Nothing matters to me more than my family - even writing, and I feel pretty passionate about that.

We have a dishwasher. I put it on each night, and do a wash in the automatic washing machine. We have a tumble drier to dry clothes, but I hang stuff on coat-hangers and leave them on hooks in the kitchen to dry.

Before bed, I sometimes write. Stewart often phones me. Sometimes I ring my mother in law. She’s a widow and she finds the evenings drag on too long. She lives in a town 50 miles away. We ought to look after her better, but she’s an independent, proud Yorkshire lass. She won’t impose on people.

I always stay up later than I mean to. Tonight it’s 1.45am. I really should get tougher with myself. My eyes will sting in the morning...