I bought Tom a new bike for his birthday. It was orange, because that’s his favourite colour. It took me ages to find one in his size that was also orange. It came and I hid it under my bed for a week until the night before his birthday, when I pulled it out and tried to assemble it and realised that I couldn’t screw on the effin left pedal or even get close to attaching the front wheel. I cried and had what may or may not have been...

Am writing, basically.

Writing a book when you have a job and a child is hard. My job comes first. It has to: I am the breadwinner and I’m lucky enough to have a job that uses words and my creativity. This is great, but it means there are no long days to sit at my desk writing. I read articles of writers’ tips and they talk about writing eight or more hours per day and it just isn’t possible when you have got to go to work. And if your job involves...

It’s Boxing Day. Day of the bloody boxes. Tom got a lot of boxes for Christmas: a chocolate lolly-making kit, 3D puzzles, Scrabble and Don’t Laugh. Don’t Laugh is a board game involving crap jokes and a microphone that farts. It’s hilarious, if you’re six. Tom is six and he looks like a cute thug with his new gummy gap at the front (he got fed up of people asking him to sing that song after about two...

I’ve never written about stretch marks before, probably because it was the one thing I hadn’t managed to sort out. Nappies and potties: far more manageable than I imagined. Brilliant little boy: sorted. Forging a career: done. Providing a roof over our heads and lots of happy memories: yep. Not detesting the sight of my own torso: still on the to-do list. For years. It seems vain and trivial to go on about aesthetics. But, unless...

What's that saying? It's better to have loved and lost than to have never loved at all. I don't think it counts in the case of a single parent. I always think it must be easier to be alone from day one than to know what it's like to have someone else around and then for them to be gone.

It’s one of the biggest mysteries in Manchester: Just what is the little e on the end of  Chill Factore for? Tom and I wonder this every time we go past the massive building next to the motorway. Are they trying to say “Chill Factory”? Is it some sort of a mathematical formula? Is it silent? So preoccupied was I with the errant vowel that I never really thought about what happened inside. As far as I was concerned, Chill...

As well as spending the week off doing fun stuff like art, parks and sliding through snow, it’s a good chance to sort out house the house. While I painted Frankenstein’s head, cleaned the kitchen and cooked a proper tea (chilli), Tom did a very good job of filling a charity sack with toys he no longer plays with (he put Buzz Lightyear in there – I thought he’d be around for… years.) “I’d give this...

The bargain basement late night delivery slot from the supermarket is great. While everyone else in the country is out spending pay day night in the pub or at a really good Halloween party, I am answering the door in my pyjamas with a towel on my head. I let the delivery man into the living room and he curses as he trips over the booster seat, then asks me just why I ordered twenty bottles of fizzy water (it’s just better than still, OK?)...

Gingerbread want to make going out to work an achievable route out of poverty for single parents. That's why they've launched the 'Make it Work for Single Parents' campaign, which ultimately aims to get 250,000 more single parents into work by 2020. You can read the full task list here.