This week is all about work and ill-health.

I'm huddled over a laptop in my piccalilli stained pyjamas with hair that would make Krusty the Clown jealous, perma-snarling at anyone who comes within a 5 metre radius. Without The Internets (that means you), by now I would have pulled my frazzled, tiny mind out of my left nostril.

This week The Internets have been lovely. These my favourites:

1.   Letters of Note: letter from a 20 year old Madonna to a film-maker. I love Madonna, and have recently taken to trapping my child in the bath with her songs blaring. It's an important part of her education she feels the love and learns all the words to Holiday. It is not abuse. It should be on the curriculum.

This letter is pure Madonna magic:

'By the time I was in the fifth grade, I knew I either wanted to be a nun or a movie star. 9 months in a convent cured me of the first disease'. 

And:

'I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan where I began my career in petulance and precociousness.'

If you don't read Letters of Note (here) - which you obviously do, because who doesn't - do so immediately. Guaranteed brilliance. 

2. Nobody can have missed the death of Jimmy Savile. Whatever you think of him - and I do concede that displaying his body at the Queen's Hotel in Leeds is more than a little ghoulish - he was a big part of my childhood.

And I'm from Leeds.

And as a teenager I worked for his bestmate as a gulag inmate of his, not so, chi-chi hair salon.

And he and I share a love of Scarborough.

(This is about as far as I can take our mutual similarities, before admitting to an early 1990s love of flamable tracksuit material, gangster gold and cuban cigars. Need I go on?) 

It's in my blood, and no doubt in yours; I watched and wanted to be on Jim'll Fix It with weekly jealous fervour. Read Dom Lawson’s account of Jim fix-in it (here). It made me tearily nostalgic.

3. I've watched The Sound of Music for the seventy billionth time with my child.

For years I’ve baffled over other people’s love for the curtain wearing nun. Really? Come on, if you had to choose (I mean had to, like your life depended on it), it’s always the Baroness, right?

She has Christopher Plummer under her thumb, looks like a dream and has the good plan of sending the seven god-awful, do-re-mi kids to boarding school. I’d send them in a brown paper package, tied up with string, but that’s just me. I never know when to stop.  

Some things never change. Whatever. Did you not see it’s been a bad week?

I'm a child of the army. I struggle to feel that I belong anywhere. I don't have a hometown - a place where I, my family and childhood friends are from - where I can lay my hat and seek solace in familiarity. In the absence of this, I always seek asylum in Scarborough. 

I feel complete when in Scarborough. Perhaps it's the reassuring clinch of the morning sea frets or the crispness of the medicinal sea air. (Though these didn't do much good for poor Anne Bronte, who was sent to Scarborough to recover her health and dropped dead on the site of the Grand Hotel.)

More likely it's part Yorkshire DNA, a pinch of acquired nostalgia and a whole lot of love for this magnificent and, somewhat faded, regency town.  

I didn't spend much time in Scarborough as a child, but I listened for hours to my mother's tales of knickerbocker glories, the donkey bridge and being buried up to the neck by her two boisterous brothers.

I've flicked through the family albums so often that their memories are mine. I blink and I feel my teenage gran's hand happily in mine, as she sashays her smart nipped-in waist down the prom, holding her hat on with daintily gloved hand; I smell the bristly tweed and tobacco of my great-granddad's three piece suit, as I nestle my face on his shoulder to protect it from the harsh North Sea breeze; I hear the squabbling and laughter of four children in matching, home-knit, itchy jumpers, as they drop crab lines off the harbour wall. Scarborough is my inheritance and it is the heirloom that I ritually share with my child. 

Scarborough gives in spades. You don't believe me, do you? Here's what you're missing:

1) The Sea. The Sea. 

You may think it's a given that you see the sea at the seaside. Well you'd be wrong. I live within spitting distance of many of the North-west's seaside resorts (Blackpool, Southport, Morecombe). "I bet I see the sea first" is a game of inevitable failure, as you all ugly squint and confusedly point at the distant horizon, hoping that the murky grey line, covered with cloud is water. To prove it's the sea, you set off determinedly, walking two miles with bucket in hand, to drearily dangle your toes in the jelly-fished water. (Don't even get me started on Grange over Sands/GRASS).

The sea in Yorkshire is proper sea. When the tide is out you can still touch it, feel it, smell it. It's noisy and wild, forcing you and your possessions to dance the slow, seaside shuffle, as it steals the beach from beneath you. 

In Scarborough it's worth spending the day building elaborate sand castles, because you know the sea will come in and satisfyingly fill your zig-zag maze of moats and tunnels. (In Southport you would be too exhausted from the hike to the shore or to daunted by the prospect of digging a stream for a mile to even begin.)

Scarborough gives good sea. 

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I could pretend my truancy is a blockage: a writerly one, which sounds awfully grand, or a physical one, which sounds delightfully smutty. Or I could just be truthful and blame the messy business of living. The school holidays have been nine weeks of hard work. Nine whole weeks: summers were never that long in my day. Like parents across the nation, we've ineptly juggled work and childcare this long wet summer: farming her out to the far corners of the land - when we can - or watching her slowly climb the walls, bored at our Herculian efforts at home based entertainment and irritated by my craft OCD. 

 ("No, no, no. You need to remember to put the lid on when you've finished with the pen and then return it to the pen box in the scientific rainbow colour spectrum. Noooo, not like that, that's clearly the rainbow song order, which is obviously wrong. You are only seven, you're clearly not ready for pen responsibility. I'll tell you what, to cheer you up shall we alphabetise the sellotape drawer again?") 

This final week has been an olympic sprint to the back-to-school finish line. Nights have been spent hunched over my kitchen table sewing more name tags than a four foot person can possibly require, whilst silently cursing marrying a man with a long surname and not calling my child Bo. As ever I have been rescued by my parents - my mother, the only person to be trusted to sew pretty the enormous labels on the outside of her entire PE kit. (Yes, the outside. The utter bastards.) And my dad, who uncomplainingly rose to the challenge of redecorating her bedroom for the 'new year, new school, new you' drama I created as some eleventh hour prickly stick to beat myself with for not: having pre-ordered her school shoes in July (even though I knew there were only two styles permitted); or stockpiling those impossible to find - without recourse to rearing a sheep, taking Rumplestiltskin on the books and hand knitting until my fingers twitch - black knee length socks, which seemed to be just everywhere in June, only to have mythically vanished in September.

I am now more than three parts gin, with a disturbing whiff of ashtray and despair.  She is back at school. We can relax. 

Today I am firmly closing the door on summer and opening a window to autumn. Like her, my new year starts in September; with the buying of new stationery, unfurling of knee length socks and the lengthening of the nights. The girls in the coffee shop, fighting the autumn on-slaught with their persistent sleeveless top wearing and frightful flip-flop clack, should surrender. There is a delicious crisp in the air, only vaguely perceptible behind the unrelenting rain, but it's definitely there if you sniff hard enough. Trust me, I'm a witch about these things.

Instead of punishing and cruel January resolutions, the September new year is all about expectation, excitement and extravagance. Unlike this ungodly list, I'll stick to every single one of my autumn almanac:

1) Navy blue nail polish

2) Knee length socks in thick, childish wool

3) Flame coloured tweeds, velvets & silk layers

4) Stodgy crumbles and custard

5) Early nights, proper telly and log fires

It's been a while. A lot has happened. The world is in turmoil.

It's at times like this when you need someone to do some important, science-y research to reassure you that everything will be ok. That we'll all come through the other side in one piece, with our dignity intact, more united than before.

As ever, I have risen to this challenge; selflessly putting myself at the frontline of current events to bring you the story that matters. 

Herewith, my top five Carrie Bradshaw outfits. Essentially shallow, eh? 

1. Boy, Girl, Boy, Girl

2. Anchors Away

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I've been tagged by Sally (here) in a memorable firsts confessional. It's taken me a while to take up this gauntlet, mainly because Sally has kept me busy with her horrifying requests to video myself (here) and partly as my memory is absolutely shocking. (I blame the gin.)

I love any opportunity to talk about myself and would confess to everything and anything for added attention. Due to extensive grey matter abuse, I've had to adjust Sally's list slightly. Sorry Sally, I'm a consummate cheat and frankly I just can't remember everything. Thank the Lord.

First record:

The first tape I ever bought myself was Five Star Silk and Steel. I am one of Tracy Barlow's contemporaries, I am the lost tape generation. (And yes, I used to go upstairs to play them.) What I can't believe is my daughter will never, ever get the joy of rewinding a tape using a pen or her finger. Poor thing.

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A couple of weeks ago I was asked to pick my favourite post from my blog. A post that hit the nail on the Elsie Anderton head, if you will. 

Predictably I exploded this simple task into full crisis of confidence, accompanied by characteristic indecision and death grip overthinking.

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It's been a strange, soul sapping kind of week. This is where I'm at:

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This morning has started with the saddest news. A client of mine, who retired on Friday, had a heart attack last night and died. 

It is all so pointless and unfair. I'm wavering between foot stamping anger and flooring sadness.  He was a one-off and was larger than life.  An old fashioned gentleman, his heart beat with a rhythm of pure kindness and generosity of spirit. His plans for retirement were epic and borderline mad,

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I've been a bit quiet. Had you noticed? 

I can't really explain the silence. We've been busy, but not so much that I couldn't share with you. I've done a lot of sitting (I'm good at that) and a lot of other stuff too.

This week I can just about manage a list for you. Here you go.

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