At the start of each new season I always find myself thinking, this is it. This is my favourite season. Autumn this year is no different. The hips on the rose covering our garden shed roof are surely redder and more numerous than ever before, the grapes are fat and black on their vine and, beyond it all, the trees are such a dizzying patchwork of colours that I wish I could paint.

I’m lucky to live here in such a beautiful and quiet place – and I only feel luckier when I catch the end of the nine o’ clock news on Radio 4 or scan the BBC news website. I say “catch” and “scan” because, I am ashamed to say, quite often nowadays the news seems to carry more misery and suffering than I can bear to let in. I suspect it was ever thus and it’s a symptom of my increasing age. I used to think I could do anything, change anything, fight anything – and I was going to do it too. Oh, I was a passionate child! Where did all of that go? I don’t remember ushering it out of the door and waving it goodbye. It must have seeped away all by itself while I was looking elsewhere, engaged with my own small life.

A relative, not from this country, said once: ‘It’s such a bubble where you live. No-one here has any idea what the rest of the world is really like.’ I wasn’t affronted. I wasn’t even surprised. His country is frequently in the news for all the wrong reasons: politics, terrorism, human rights, health – you name it – this country has all the bases covered. However, it was also the birthplace of the poet-philosopher, Iqbal.

The pageant of Nature is a fathomless ocean of beauty,

If eyes were to see every drop has in it tumultuous beauty.

It is ever present in the mirror like sheen of morning sky,

And the dusk of the evening and the flower spangled twilight.

Rivulets gushing down the hills and free-flowing rivers have it,

It is there in the city, the wilderness, the deserted places and in

man’s abode.

The soul, however, yearns for something, missing,

Otherwise why should it toll the knell of sorrow in this desert?

Even the open display of beauty keeps it restless,

It lives like a fish out of water.

It was dawn and yearningly I looked around searching for a

beautiful sight,

I saw a single ray of the sun wandering in the heavens.

I will be collyrium and would integrate with the human eye,

And make visible all that night had hidden from view.

Were the entranced at all keen to become conscious?

Were the asleep desirous of awakening?

Those beautiful words come from Bāng-i Darā (The Call of the Marching Bell). Of course, I like them for their enchanting images of the natural world but it’s more than that. With their insertion of Mankind into the poem, they remind me more successfully than any news outlet can of what my brain wants me to forget. Nature is illuminated by the morning sun but, for the poet, a question mark remains over whether Mankind will share a similar enlightenment (Were the entranced at all keen to become conscious? Were the asleep desirous of awakening?). It’s salutary to realise that this poem, written over one hundred years ago, still has no answer. The sun still rises, the seasons still change, nature, against many odds, is still glorious and we – at least the adult “we” – still sleepwalk on, all of us blind to the world outside our own bubbles and oblivious to what might be waiting beyond even nature’s magnificence.

Last week, sorting through the junk in the loft, I found my old diaries. Not all of them: the earliest are marooned under the floorboards in the bathroom of the house I grew up in after my father nailed down the loose board I accessed my hidey-hole through and I was too embarrassed, in my ten-year old way, to tell him what he’d imprisoned down there. Of the rest, parts are thankfully illegible, some pages – oh, the dramatic shame of it – appear to be tear-stained and almost the whole lot makes me cringe. The egotism of being fifteen (They [my parents] haven’t said so but I am the problem in this house….), the scorching certainty of a nineteen year-old that this one boy is the only boy in the world for her (I’ll never meet anyone like him again. This was my chance and I’ve seen him walk away in the arms of another girl….), the terror of being twenty-two and leaving university for a job in a city I didn’t want to be in (The noise, the people, the people, the noise! Is this it for ever? How did I come to this?) and then, more happily, a whole series of travel diaries. Glancing through them takes me back to my first African safari, much of it done in an ex-WWII army lorry, my first trip to India, only two days after 9/11, and to many different places in Europe – some of which I was lucky enough to visit as a result of a very enjoyable job in the city that my twenty-two year-old self had hated so much. I was eight when I started my diary, inspired by a child’s version of Anne Frank’s diary. Hers is still one of my favourites – not just because of the literary brilliance her words hint at (what a wordsmith she could have become!) but more because of the zestful way she lived – and recorded – life. But there are other diaries too. There are literary giants: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Samuel Pepys and Alan Bennet (these are in no particular order apart from the one in which the names occurred to me); and then there are those where the individual’s relative lack of fame makes the literary dialogue between the private self and the page no less valuable. Two in particular occur to me. The first is Olive’s Diary, written by a 16 year-old English girl at school in Paris in 1914. Recovered and serialised on the web by a journalist, Rob McGibbon, who’d been given the diary some years earlier, it tells the story, in her own words, of the last six weeks of her life. Tucked into its final pages are newspaper cuttings announcing her sudden death. In some ways, it is the tragedy of another young life cut so awfully short that provides the pathos but, in another, it is her joyous descriptions of Paris and her homesickness that make it so effortless to identify with her. The reader could be her…. she could be the reader; those experiences that all of us share to some degree or other evoke a tenderness and a sympathy that is not easily forgotten. The second is the Red Leather Diary, a seventy-five year old diary rescued from a one-way trip to a New York dump by Lily Koppel, a young journalist. The author, Florence Wolfson, proved still to be alive and, together, the two women used the diary to produce an enchanting memoir of life as lived by a privileged young woman in 1930s Manhattan. Much of the joy and fascination in the book comes from Florence Wolfson’s own reactions to meeting her younger self. The literary and artistic aspirations she’d held were, by and large, unmet despite the promise the diary suggested (she’s acquainted and, in some cases, has affairs with soon-to-be-famous poets, authors and actresses) but the sense of a life lived is undimmed. And that has to be one of the chief standard bearers, flag waving wildly in the wind, for diary-writing. We – that is, any of us who choose to do so, whether literary giants or not – write diaries to prove to ourselves that we were here, that we lived and loved in the best way we knew how. *Original quotation: In chaos, there is fertility –  Anaïs Nin.

Not long ago, I watched Lost in Living, a film which aims to explore what happens to the creative impulse when a woman becomes a mother. From the lofty viewpoint afforded me by – to date – six years of motherhood and, um, several hundred hours browsing Mumsnet’s talk boards (delightful as it is, that place could be used to define “time sucker” – ideal for a procrastinating writer), I laughed out loud when two heavily pregnant young women – one artist, one writer – were talking about how life would be once their babies were born. You wait, you just wait, the little voice in my head said. To be fair, both women were expecting changes: the artist was predicting that her output would slow and the writer worried about how she would get her daily three hours writing done. Both had correctly predicted the practical hurdle to their creativity that their baby would pose. And, all credit to them, this was more than I did when in the same situation (I hadn’t then discovered Mumsnet). However what neither had guessed – and, really, how could they? – was how their status as best friends bonded mainly over their artistic lives would change as the tentacles of parenthood grew stronger.   

In contrast to these two young women, the film also shows two older women – their families now grown. Again, one is an artist and the other the writer, Merrill Joan Gerber, who is not nearly as well-known as she deserves. It was the interviews with their adult children that I found most illuminating. Of course, there are parallels with any pursuit (many professional jobs, for example) that take both a parent, and that parent’s attention, away from a child for long periods of time. And yet there are things peculiar to the arts that are questions worth asking. How many of us would really like to have our lives depicted in our mother’s books? And how many would not feel some resentment of a mother who prioritised locking herself away to paint pictures that, at least at the time, brought little fame and less money? Can writing, and its artistic equivalents, achieve equilibrium with family life?

Unless, god forbid, our children predecease us, motherhood ends only with our deaths. With the birth of the first baby, that’s it: motherhood is the job there’s no resigning from. At first, it tends to assume a pre-eminent, crushing importance, which squashes everything else. But slowly, slowly, most women want their “me-ness” back. It seeps out in different ways for different people: first post-baby trip to the hairdresser, the pub or a swim; then, perhaps, a return to work or a much loved sports club. Isn’t writing just an extension of that?

Oh, I wanted the trips to the hairdressers and the pub, the swim and, hell, even the return to work.  But I was….greedy….I wanted to keep putting dozens of different lives on paper. And writing requires the sort of time, space and, crucially, head space that few other pursuits do. I snap at people who interrupt me when I’m writing and sit on my chair, twitching, waiting for them to leave the room. If what I was doing was regular paid employment, I could justify it more easily (‘Don’t you want your swimming lessons?’ ‘What about the roof over your head?’). I can’t even say that I write because I have to; that it makes me a nicer person and a better parent. Any adult listening to such an explanation would surely see that as pure selfish indulgence and ask why I hadn’t learnt better self-control; a small child simply wouldn’t understand.   

However, my daughter is only four and my son six. How can I know how they will respond to what I do(n’t do)?  In my gloomier moments, I think, well, what does it matter anyway? Phillip Larkin was right. Whatever path I take, I’ll f*ck them up. That’s the job description, right? And on other days when I’ve had more than five hours’ unbroken sleep, when the sun hits the Acer in my garden at just the right angle to show off its glorious redness and my tea has brewed for precisely the right number of minutes and seconds, there’s nothing that could make my life better. I have my family, I have my writing and, in combining the two, I am treading a path already well laid out by others and, I hope, showing my children a valid way to be happy.

I’ve done what I’ve wanted to for ever such a long time: I’ve written a book. In fact, I spent so long writing it, editing it, rewriting it, changing a comma here and a semi-colon there that I’d quite forgotten why I’d written it at all. Not why I was writing – not that, never that – but why I had written that particular story. And then someone asked me.

‘It was the place,’ I said, thinking aloud.

‘The place? Africa itself, you mean?’ she said. I could see the scepticism on her face.

‘No. Yes. Well, sort of.’ I nearly gave up trying to explain then and there. I wanted to tell her just to read the book but I couldn’t because it’s not published yet, perhaps never will be, and I hate the idea of shoving my work at friends or family who haven’t specifically asked to see it. ‘East Africa,’ I went on. ‘Savannahs and wildebeest migrations; Masai herdsmen in checked blankets; Englishmen with money and ideals who imagined they could make it their land. That sort of thing.’

Her eyebrows, already raised, went a little higher but I was comforted by the explanation. It went some of the way to explaining the genesis of the book. It began with a place, and there’s always a reason why we go somewhere. Even if the reason is a bored travel agent telling us that our £200 budget will stretch only as far as a two star hotel complete with construction site and cockroaches in Kavos, that’s no more or less a reason than Gerald Durrell’s mother, Louisa, deciding to relocate her family somewhere warmer and cheaper than “Pudding Island”.

 Like the Durrells – and perhaps because of them – it was to Greece that I was planning to go in the long ago summer of 1999, once I’d augmented that £200 budget with money from the premium bonds that had never given me back so much as a tenner. And then the friend for whom the trip was really planned – an American who was thoroughly seduced by the idea of island hopping in the Ionian Sea – came home early from work one day with a headache. As it turned out, it wasn’t just any headache: an unseen aneurysm bulged and then burst. Less than two weeks later, she was dead.

Anaesthetised by a grief I vaguely felt was not mine to feel, I cancelled the Greek trip. I was busy at work and, I said to myself, deadlines and late night cocktails would be as good a distraction as any. My best friend disagreed. She turned up at my door early one Saturday, woke me up and waved a sheaf of rainbow-hued brochures in front of my face. What about, she suggested, taking that trip to Africa we’ve been talking about for years.

Hobbled by a hangover and too much caffeine, I blinked. I picked up one of the brochures. Stretching across its cover was a blue sky kept from crystalline perfection by clouds like cobwebs. Warmth began to wash through my veins and an internal video player clicked onto a film gleaned from years of Attenborough documentaries: millions of wildebeest trekked across plains that shimmered in a hazy heat I never got to experience in England; indolent lions sprawled, sun drugged, in long grass; and flamingos, perched on absurd chopstick legs, coloured lakes pinker than candy floss.

And so it was, having cashed in all the premium bonds, a month or so later, my friend and I were on our way into Nairobi in a taxi with a sign on the dashboard that read God Speed Us. It was dark and once we had entered the city, we could have been anywhere, were it not for the splayed, spiky-topped acacia trees that paced the main road. The neon signs (Drink Coca-Cola! Sony Sounds!) were the same as everywhere and most of the buildings looked as large and high as those in any British city.

However, as we rounded a corner, the driver waved a hand vaguely towards the left and said, ‘Norfolk Hotel’. I saw a veranda, lit by hanging lanterns spilling streams of light into bushes gaudy with flowers. Behind was the hotel building itself, snug in the darkness. I knew that in the early twentieth century many settlers had started their trek, along the rough red roads to the Highlands, from that hotel. Most of those settlers are long gone and cars replace their oxen, yet the Norfolk remains. At that moment, something of the history of the place entered me. And it’s not left yet.