The novel that I’m writing at the moment is set on the French canals, which provides me with an excellent excuse to bob across the Channel now and again to do some research. We’ve just returned from a trip which started in Namur in Belgium and took us through the utterly beautiful but overlooked Ardennes all the way to Champagne.

Travelling by water reduces me to the same kind of contemplative state that I arrive at when I’m writing, at a point where a sense of peacefulness and an intense awareness of beauty intersect. The quietest spot on our boot is up at the front where you can’t hear the engine, where you can sit so that you glide a few feet above the river, overwhelmed with its greenness and the lushness of the banks. Visually ravishing (even the industrial zones we’ve passed through have a spiky, raw intensity) it’s an experience that feeds all the senses: the vivid colours and the astonishing light make me hungry for music and poetry and good food and each day ends in sated lassitude.

Napoleon decreed that three metres either side of the waterways should be common land, which means that it is possible to tie up without trespassing in lonely, lovely places.

It’s a profound way to travel: we don’t cover much ground, which gives us the chance to immerse ourselves in local history (this trip yielded up Rimbaud and Verlaine, Joan of Arc and Charlemagne, who pops up just about everywhere), vernacular architecture (the cathedrals and the tiny village churches are to die for) and regional cuisine – this is France, after all.

Our watery world is populated with herons and otters and swans and baby coots and the people we meet along the way are no less varied and intriguing. At times it feels like there is almost too much inspiration; that’s when we know it’s time to pack up and come home, to download all the ideas and emotions and free up our hard drive for the next time.

My sister threw me a lifeline yesterday by telling me that it is fifty years since Harper Lee published To Kill a Mockingbird, a book that I have never read. A book of such enormous stature but I really feel I ought to pay it the respect that it deserves and read it urgently, this week,  now. Perhaps this will let me off the hook, Thubron - wise, although I do want to read about Damascus, because I know that it will be good for me and I shall be glad when I have.

I had my fix of the countryside at the weekend, which I think is an absolute necessity when you are writing as it stimulates an appetite for beauty, it truly does inspire. I went to Norfolk with my mum, wandering along endless beaches and through meadows that were waist high with cow parsley, sharing together the shining world. Lovely stuff.

Xandra was crisp in her greeting and showed me into her office. I sat at a round table of polished wood and looked out at the tumbling green garden while she went and made tea and settled her daughter with some distracting activity - something I could probably have done with too. On her return she produced the first three pages of the manuscript I had sent her and proceeded to go through it forensically, line by line. “That’s weak: if you move the clause there, it will strengthen what you’re trying to do here. Never use adverbs, in fact, imagine you have to pay for every word you write — that’s how sparingly you should use them.You’re telling me what is happening: show it instead.”

For an hour I sat there nodding, turning pink, feeling abject at what I thought was her demolition of every single syllable that I had written. I kept wondering why she had ever asked to see me — why? To be kind, I supposed. To let me down gently, although actually it felt anything but gentle; it felt brutal. Truthful, businesslike, but brutal. On and on she went, until at one point she said, “I quite like that phrase,” but she said it so quickly and went on to criticise something else with such vehemence that I thought I had imagined it. Three pages in one hour. By the time she had finished, I wanted the ground to open up and swallow me. She sat back. “If you think you can work with me, I’d be happy to take you on.”

I hope my jaw didn’t drop, though I think it might have done. Her offer transformed what had seemed like a critical assault on what I had tried to do into a masterclassin how to write. it was literary alchemy, pure gold, and fired me up more than anything before or since. From then on I sent her a chapter at a time and she responded with a postcard containing a reading list of books and authors I should be studying. She sent me Rilke’s advice to a young poet and I came to see that beneath her businesslike exterior was an astonishing intuition and creativity. She was generous with what she knew and happy to pass it on - something I have tried to do in my turn.

I wrote my way to the end of the story I was trying to tell and then went back and rewrote the opening three chapters. Within three months of my finishing it, she had sold my first novel, Rebecca’s Children. At the time, it seemed as easy as falling off a log, which only goes to show how much I still had to learn (and have been learning ever since).

I’m not a lucky person. I stopped doing the lottery because I never won as much as fourpence halfpenny. When I was small and my dad used to put a bet on the Grand National for me each year, my horse would fall at the first fence every time. The only prize I ever won was a £50 hamper from an off-licence in South London which, on collection, turned out to be full of a quarter bottle each of whisky and vodka and my own body weight in soda water. So to be asked to write the TV column for a lovely little magazine called Waitrose Weekend feels like manna from heaven. It means I can devote myself to writing my book, just as soon as I’ve finished watching  Marco’s Kitchn Burnout.

I’m  a hundred percent behind E.M. Forster when he says “Books do furnish a room”. A house without books feels sterile to me, without resonance, without old friends. I like the higgledy-piggledy sight of them, piled up on the shelves in all shapes, colours and sizes. I like the juxtaposition of finding Smut by Christian Enzenberger next to The Glastonbury Legends by R.F. Treharne and Marcel Proust beside Anne Rice. I like the fact that I can look at my collection of novels by Thomas Hardy and think, I’ve read all those, and then look at the collection of Trollope novels inherited from my grandmother and think, One day I might actually get round to reading those as well. In this way, for me, books represent my achievement and what remains of my potential; they represent my past and my future. In many ways they provide me with a route map through my life, because I write in every single one of them when and where I bought it, and sometimes for what reason. It makes it possible to plot my changing tastes, my development as a reader, the fads, the lapses (and also the single-minded pursuit of excellence, of course.)

So it was with some surprise that I found myself arguing with my mother, who devours books so voraciously that she makes my attempts at reading seem half-hearted, about the coming of the e-book. The thing is, in a weird way, I think we should embrace it as a good thing. This is not because of its convenience, although being able to take a dozen books away on holiday without  staggering under their weight has much to commend it. I’m broadly in favour because I think that the story you want to tell can transcend the medium in which you choose to tell it. I also fear that if you don’t embrace the new and seize on the possibilities it presentsl, if you are not open to fresh paths and different ways, you may lose a  kind of imaginative susceptibility.

I can remember all the misgivings I had when I first started using a computer to write and although there is much I miss about the physical act of putting pen to paper, I wouldn’t go back to it. I suspect that one day I shall feel the same about an e-book. I shall keep the shelves and shelves of books that I have collected down the years as they furnish my heart and  my head as well as my room, but I feel sure that the readers who come after, their imaginations kindled, might read in different ways,  but they won’t read any less than I have done, or find any less delight.

Before that, indulging my Van Gogh mood, I dug out a copy of Lust for Life by Irving Stone. Writting in the 1930s, Stone was able to interview a number of people who were personally acquainted with Van Gogh and as a result portrays him with great empathy and plausibility. Some of the irresistible vitality of the paintings finds its way into his narrative. I hadn’t read it since I was a teenager, but it was a delight to rediscover and I’m now pressing it on all my friends.

….and I just had to take a picture.

We had the first glimmering intimation that spring was on its way: the sun shone and the crocuses were fighting the snowdrops for space.

I’ve been a bit stressed lately, finishing one job and starting another has had me fraying at the the seams, and although being awash with feelings of anxiety isn’t  the most comfortable state, I think it can mean that all your feelings are intensified. Walking through this ancient landscape on Mother’s Day filled me with thoughts about my own Mum, who is a little frailer, white-haired and a little more translucent, but as engaged and vigourous as ever. It also made me think about the blessing and gift of being a mum myself. My son Jack has led me down the path to knowledge since he was first able to walk, and before that as well.

I had some of these pleasing thoughts while sitting on a bridge eating a picnic, gazing down into the greenness, watching the underwater waltz of the streaming weeds

A spring walk at a stressful time: the grit in the oyster which produced such  a lustrous afternoon.

That’s what I love about Van Gogh : he wears his heart on his sleeve, both in his correspondence and in his art, which is so freighted with emotion and yearning that the images are both painful and elating to behold; an extraordinary blend of vividness and vulnerability.

One of the most touching things about the visit was the number of children who were there. It was lovely to stand looking at a painting next to a dad with his six-year-old clamped to his hip, and hear him explain about what they were looking at and about Van Gogh and what he was trying to achieve and how difficult it was for him. It made me realise that there is a kind of childlike quality to his work, it speaks directly to the observer without guile, so that even the very young can find something to wonder at in what Mervyn Peake described as “…twisted canvases of quenchless fire.”