After that we went to London and stayed for a few nights in a house belonging to friends who were on holiday, which meant we were able to pretend to be the sort of people who live in a beautiful house in West London; it also meant the children got to learn how to cross roads and use the Tube. They were soon frowning at people who put their feet on the seats and racing for the empty space at the end of the carriage.

The five of us dashed around, and visited museums, galleries, the maze in Trafalgar Square. We walked up the Monument and went to Toy Story 3 in the Trocadero. We were proper tourists and it was wonderful. The Polka Theatre in Wimbledon, a children’s theatre, was a great discovery, though by then I would have been grateful for any form of entertainment that involved sitting down in a darkened room.

We are now back in Cornwall and although it’s raining, it’s good to be home after our blast of city life. London was wildly exciting for a few days, but it’s good to be back. Now I have a book to finish, The Perfect Lie out in paperback next week, and I’m going to be talking at the Penzance Literary Festival a few days after that. James and the children are off school for another three weeks, but I am very much back at work.

It is much easier to concentrate at that time, because there is no point whatsoever in getting up before 5 only to be distracted by things on the internet, or by idly wondering what’s for breakfast. I know that time is short, that my children will be bumbling sleepily down the stairs in a couple of hours. It is my favourite time of the day, by far, for writing. Anything seems possible.

The downside, of course, is that I feel it’s bedtime by about 3 o’clock, and I am good for nothing at all in the evening. Occasionally when I’m out and about, I catch a glimpse of some poor woman with jowly eyes and bizarre blotchy skin, before realising that it’s a shop window or a mirror. And, to top it all off, I am the proud owner of a caffeine twitch which (unless everyone is kindly lying to me) is invisible to the outside world.

All the same, for the next few weeks, this is my life and I am strangely enjoying it, but only because it’s adrenaline-charged by pure panic. When it’s finished I will be back to 7 o’clock starts, which will be a luxury. I wish I could send a postcard back through time to my decade-ago self announcing that there would come a time when 7am would be classified as a lie-in. On balance, though, it’s probably best that I can’t.

I was strangely nervous at the sight: I was scared that I might send them away thinking that authors and books were boring. I did my best to explain to them what life as an author is like, and they threw questions at me which ranged from ‘how much do you get paid?’ to ‘what’s your favourite book you’ve ever read?’ (a tricky one), via just about everything else in between. They were delighted to hear that when I met my husband, one of their teachers, he had a ponytail.

Over the course of the day, I met children aged 7 – 11. They were insatiable, funny, excitable and wonderful. I read them a carefully-selected passage from my new book, a section from the first chapter that is literally a cliffhanger. The children went on to continue the story themselves, and the two winners will get a name check in the book I am currently writing. The entries were fantastic, and the winners were unbelievably impressive.

The whole day (which happened to be election day) put the boot into the whole stupid idea of ‘Broken Britain’. This is a school in Camborne, a Cornish ex mining town that has significant social problems and unemployment. If you were to believe what the Tories were saying during the election campaign, it should have been full of feral children failing to learn to read. In fact, the children were polite and motivated, the staff supremely dedicated, the whole atmosphere controlled, calm and happy. There are things that Labour did well, and education is one of them. That was obvious to me when we moved back here from France, and it is even more obvious now.

I am beginning to wish I wrote children’s books, so that I could do more visits like that. In fact, watch this space.