Such a perfect day...

The first result was waking up without a hangover despite being out until 1am. I was most restrained; only a couple of glasses of wine over a superb Italian meal followed by two cocktails. The last being a Caipirinha taken alone in a dimly lit smokey bar that I've been going to for years called 'El Benidorm'. Cheesy name but a great bar; I think the part that I love best is having to ring the bell to be allowed in.

Kiera and I walked to meet our friends Andreu and Monica with a brief refuelling stop at Starbucks. The coffee here is so incredible I usually avoid my regular American coffee haunt but Kiera needed a third breakfast - don't ask - and so in stopping for a muffin I decided upon a take-away Chai Tea latte.

Bumping into our friends we walked down towards the beautiful and elegant church of Santa Maria del Mar, continuing to meet Alex, Eva and their adorably blond but otherwise totally Spanish two year old son Nicolas. Only in Barcelona would we find such a family all dressed as pirates, unselfconsciously sword fighting, oblivious to any onlookers. I know it's Carnival weekend here but really, would any English person ever do this?

We walked to the gorgeous Parc de la Ciutadella, strolling with all the Spanish families in the beautiful spring weather. The children played on the park as we spotted more pirates, some of the dalmations, and most disturbing, a woman old enough to be my grandmother wearing red horns with a red pointed tail poking out from underneath her trench coat. Obviously it's not just my friends who have a capacity for taking any opportunity for outlandish self-expression through costume.

We then spent the perfect Barcelona afternoon eating ensaladilla rusa, chicken and bread while drinking red wine and cava in Alex and Eva's eccentrically beautiful apartment, punctuated only by the occasional cigarette while the children played and we listened to music, laughing and debating and taking photographs of the children and of each other in a pirate hat. It's days like these that make me want to live in this incredible city. There's a relaxed quality to this time amongst friends that differs inexorably from similar-style English afternoons - a difference that I find captivating and nourishing and stimulating.

Of course, after two or three small glasses of red wine and the cava I was little stimulated and more in need of a nap but having run out of time to follow the perfect day with the typical Spanish siesta I shall save my sleep for tonight. It will be deep I'm sure, and my dreams will be of more afternoons like today in my future.

Drunk posting

Okay here's what I love about Barcelona. You go out with your friends for a quick, post-work drink before, apparently, coming home to eat dinner with your friend's pregnant wife. You meet up with your oldest, and let's face it, favourite friend Monica and before you know it, you've had a couple too many Mojitos. Enough to have a devil-may-care attitude to dinner. Said friend that got you into this mess decides to go home and now it's midnight and you're walking the streets home after several cocktails.

Your friends always insist on walking you home despite a million explanations that you know where you're going. There's always that moment of doubt however because every street in Barcelona has two identities. The day time and the night time identity - defined by a shift in grey metal shopfronts that appear without warning to change the face of every street that you know. I did know where I was, but this freedom of streets that shift their faces is my favourite part of the whole city. Gone are the narrow shops full of fruit and wine and in their place only dingy, smokey bars, unrecognisable shop fronts and scores of foreign-looking people holding six-packs for sale.

This mutation of identity is the best bit of this place not because of the several cocktails that you've consumed that make once familiar places unrecognisable but because the city shifts when you don't notice. It's like going out with your husband and coming home with a gorgeous stud that you can't wait to have sex with for the first time. The element of surprise is overwhelming; each street a potential new lover that consists of unexplored terrain that you can't wait to stroke with your fingers or your tongue.

In England, when I've had a few I can't wait for my bed, but here going home feels like a grief, a reminder of the unexplored territory that lies within reach, a desperation of more, new, now, drunk, don't care, let's keep going beyond all reason.

It's probably a good job my friends decided to walk me home despite my many assurances that I knew exactly where I was. I did; I know this barrio of Barcelona well - I've walked its streets at night and at day and know enough road names to figure it out even if my alcohol consumption makes me choose the long way home. If they hadn't insisted with such chivalry, to see me to my door, I'd have gone in that still-open-since-10am cafe/bar at the end of the street and introduced myself to the cute young men at the bar. I'd have made extra trouble for myself when, god knows, I don't need it.

'Escapamos' I said to Xavi when we left the building at 8pm tonight. I meant it; let's escape. Every trip here is an escape for me, from my life, my language, my loves, my hard times. I love it.

Hola from Barcelona

I know, I know, how lucky can one girl get? A meeting with an agent all planned for two weeks from now, a night out last Friday with a gorgeous man and a trip to Barcelona, all within a few days of one another.

I'm glad it's all finally here; that's it's all finally happening. I've been waiting for the shift in my life for several months now. I could feel it beginning to move but it seemed to be taking its own sweet time. I need a few lessons in patience - it's never been my strong suit.

I joke that I allow myself to be bad when I'm in Barcelona but now that I think of it I'm really not as bad as I could be. I arrived at the house of my very good friends Xavi and Mara and he'd specifically bought a bottle of Rioja for me. I don't usually drink at home during the week, but hey, I'm on holiday. I even had a glass with lunch today! I do, however, always smoke when I'm here. Smoking is a guilty pleasure that I only partake of occasionally in England but here it's just so much more acceptable that these days I plan to do it before I even arrive.

I will have to limit my bad behaviour being here this time with my six-year-old daughter. It's her fourth trip to Barcelona if you don't count the fact that she was conceived here. It's my fifteenth trip, or seventeenth or something like that - there's too many for me to remember now. I met my Spanish friend Monica on a school exchange trip in 1990 and over 3am discussions about our virginity (okay hers, mine was gone by then) we bonded for life. I'm aiming for three trips here this year rather than the usual two.

So aside from a little indulgence in fantastic Catalan food, a little too much Rioja and the smoking I'm being quite a good girl really. My real bad behaviour is going on in England; having to confront myself doing things that I never thought I'd do. I'm going with Elisabeth Lesser on this one. In her book Broken Open she says - I'm paraphrasing - that we have to confront and fully integrate the shadow side of our personality in order to release its energy into our life; energy that we were hitherto using to repress that side of ourselves.

Now that I'm going to spend some time allowing myself to be bad or at the very least not seeking the approval of others I can probably think of some really creative ways to make some trouble. Now where did I put the number of that babysitter...

How I worship divine timing

It's all beginning to make sense. The struggle to understand my current life high-growth experience may well have been worth it because I seem to have a meeting with an agent to discuss my book. I'm not a superstitious person. I believe that whatever you believe will come true; if you think that walking under a ladder brings you bad luck then it will do so. However, I'm not mentioning this hopefully wonderful agent by name just in case.

Other than my refusal to bring this particular pertinent life-detail into print I have decided that I am no longer going to edit or otherwise limit my writing because of any fear of terrible things happening to me with respect to my personal relationships with any family members, friends or men. Sorry Dad, I may well end up writing about sex; me having sex that is. Sorry Mom, I'll be writing about the life and love choices that I make that you disapprove of and even the challenges in our relationship that make you uncomfortable. Sorry to the men in my life of now or future, I may be commenting on your performance or the size of your equipment. When I end up with an agent or even a publisher - note my determination with the use of the word 'when' and not 'if' - I will have to add them to the list too.

Those of you that have never been the kind of people that worry about what others think may find my teenage-like angst most amusing or otherwise baffling but I assure you that it's very real. If we met in person you wouldn't believe it. I come across as confident and self-assured, which, in many ways I am. I've always been confident about my personality and my work, my intelligence and my social skills, while inwardly not believing I was beautiful or sexy. It's taken a long time and the dumping of a particular husband who kept me trapped in that place - with my 'permission' naturally - to get over that and realise my attractiveness. A big thank you here to the men (I feel compelled to point out of very limited numbers) that have helped me along that journey and to those that were of the same club as my ex-husband, fuck you very much.

Sadly, just as a person may give up an addiction to smoking and replace it with cream buns, I have, for some reason, replaced my lack of confidence in the area of my physical self with concerns of how my writing will be received by those that love and like me. I find writing to be an intimately revealing process; it is where I remove not only all of my clothes but my entire physical self and take my innermost thoughts and feelings and lay them onto a table for the world to peruse. The process of doing this makes such incredible sense to me personally; it feels more right as work than any other that I have done. As such I am giving myself long-overdue permission to follow this path wherever it may lead me and I can no longer apologise, limit myself or worry about the receipt of what I am doing with those people closest to my heart.

Don't even mention my kid - my wonderful six-year-old daughter Kiera. Kim, a writer friend of mine said that it's never bothered her what her parents think about what she has written but do her children really need to know of her long history with anal sex? It was only by the grace of my thankfully well-exercised pelvic floor that I didn't soak my chair before realising that she may well have opened up a whole new set of worries for me. I hadn't even thought what Kiera might think of her mother and what her mother has to say. I think it was Freud that said that children suffer most from the unfulfilled and unlived dreams of their parents. So to Kiera - Mummy is sorry, but this is my dream. I hope that you learn well from watching me reach for it. All I have ever wanted for you is for you to know how to look inside your own heart to find what you love so that you may do it. I hope that watching Mummy now, however embarrassing for you, teaches you how to do that.

Such approval I seek

I told my friend Jane that I read somewhere about most writers never writing anything interesting until their parents are dead. She said "I would say that the writer who told you that was a pussy, but I'm not sure I my mother saw anything interesting I had written before she died." Jane's not known for mincing her words. It's one of my favourite things about her.

I'm trying very hard to get a grasp on precisely why I need so much approval from other people on certain matters. It all originates with my parents and while there are many people in my life whose approval I don't seek, I do look for it from certain people other than my parents, although they are the main focus of it.

I'm confused. In some ways I'm completely independent of their approval. I knew they wouldn't like it when I chose a homebirth for my daughter but I did it anyway. They were disapproving of me breastfeeding her until she was nearly three and they certainly didn't like the home educating that I did until she was six, but all of this I handled with very little bother as to what they thought of me.

Perhaps it's because that was all related to me being a mother. I'm prepared to take the flak over my parenting decisions because it's not about me; it's about my child and I have to put her needs before anyone else - including my own need for approval.

Things are much harder when it's about me personally only I can't figure out how much of it is about me needing to love and approve of myself or about having that approval from others. My mother and a friend of mine dislike most intensely that I am seeing this man. I feel tremendously un-guilty considering I've always thought of myself as a highly principled and moral person.

I had lunch with my neither approving-nor-disproving friend Carole in a tapas bar in Windsor last weekend, post new-boots shopping. At the end of the meal I said I may well claim some mileage back (from my own company) on all the trips I'm making down south lately. Carole said that she could never do that, whereas I consider a slight massage of mileage figures to be financially prudent behaviour. I had to reflect afterwards that perhaps my morals are much lower than I've always considered them to be. Perhaps being a highly-principled person is simple something I've always told myself that isn't necessarily true.

I am finding with those friends and family that are judging my current behaviour that they are projecting their own issues and it's all about them and not me. Having this understanding is not stopping me from being affected by their feelings about what I'm doing. I can't figure out if this is because I am conflicted about what I am doing and I'm blaming them for 'making me feel' like that or if I don't like it that they aren't currently approving of what I'm doing.

I could probably live with the whole issue if it weren't for how it leaks over into how I feel about my writing. Even if I were writing fiction I know that a writer puts so much of themselves into what they are writing it can be revealing, but they are able to hide behind it being imaginative and fantasy. My writing so far seems to be non-fiction and it all falls into the most personal parts of my personality and relationships; places where I will have to talk about my ex-husband, my childhood and my sex life. I am not going to be able to do that freely unless I distance myself from the requirement of approval from those that love me. Maybe I simply need to trust that they will love me whether they approve of what I'm doing or not.