It is five in the morning. I haven't slept well. In truth I haven't slept at all. I didn't get in from London until late last night and was afraid of sleeping through the alarm. We went to a gallery in Cork Street to see Anthony Hopkin's paintings. Mr Hopkins has been in some dire films but none quite so bad as his paintings. Perhaps like Hannibal Lector they are intended to frighten. So I toss and turn and hear every chime of the church clock and finally I am up and dressed and ready to leave before six for the BBC radio studios in Gloucester. It's a filthy drive, whatever the weather, and the roads are packed with lorries at that time, nudging and hemming me in, and I and my little car feel very small and vulnerable. Especially when I turn on the radio and hear that Toyotas are death traps without breaks, liable to run away and do their own thing at any moment. Except of course it is like piggy flu, an exaggerated figment of the imagination of a depressed and depressive media. I press my brakes gingerly and my head bangs against the sun visor.

The studio is like the Marie Celeste or Saturday night television. All the lights are on but no-one's at home. I am greeted warmly by a girl who could be anyone. I long ago learnt not to make assumptions in television or radio on the basis of age, gender, or dress. This lovely, cheery girl is doing everything but above all she makes a cup of...well, I think it is tea, but it is another thing about the BBC you can never be entirely sure. I chat to the cleaning lady who, it transpires also cleaned the ward at Gloucester Hospital where Mr Brain was once incarcerated. In a brief moment I hear details about her private life. 'Do I look like the sort of woman who would have children?' she asks. Well, actually she does. All lovely and jolly and the colour of polished conkers. They are playing 'wake me up, buttercup' and the cleaner and I embrace (she lives alone between girlfriends) and skip up and down the corridor. The Girl says, 'ah, aerobics' so she doesn't get out much.

Mark Cummings, who hosts the breakfast show, is about as far from Chris Moyles as you can get. He doesn't try to be controversial or cunning or nasty or even especially clever. But he is. Clever, I mean. Technically his is a job that takes multi-tasking to new levels. Amidst all he has to do he is always delighted to see me, though I suspect I may be a mixed blessing. In front of me are the daily papers and it my job to trawl through them and pick out interesting bits. It's one of those jobs that if you had an hour or two you could come up with some great titbits but the nature of this programme is you have no time at all. At any moment Mark will look at me and ask my opinion on John Terry ('a dreadful warning to all men that at 29 you can look like 49 if you behave badly'). M. P.s ('it was only one million pounds and took ten times that to retrieve, and if there is a moral it is that we should vote'), broadband and computers, ('make sure you hoover and dust your equipment and get a man in to service it regularly'), golf ('there's an article here that says your golf swing is best if you don't think about it, a principle that holds true in anything I should have thought, except surgery')....and all the time interminable weather and road reports. It is a miracle to me that I managed the journey without either.

Mark asks me what I am doing at the moment and I tell him that I have spent the last three years trying to put behind me the Big Brother experience and establish myself as a credible writer. I am about to ruin all that in a foolish enterprise. Mad, mad, I tell you. In my defence I tell him it is in aid of a local charity to which one cannot say 'no'. He guesses straight away but generously gives me plenty of time to tease the audience and promote the cause. It annoys me that everyone who comes on our screen is selling something, yet another tatty autobiography, tour or if it isn't very long, tourette, so I feel I can be ruthless in promoting the work of a hospice.

Between items I am asked to guess the middle name of contributors. Sometimes these innocuous little 'fillers' are surprisingly successful. The phone lines buzz with people calling in. I guess the weather man's middle name is his mother's maiden name, Precipitation. He laughs and says 'Kenneth' which I claim is close. In every instance I am wrong. Which is good. I have become something of a local guru. People seek my opinion on diverse matters. This is because I am always, consistently wrong. Today I predict that no action will be taken against M. P.s or John Terry. I speak with absolute authority, as usual, and am wrong in both instances, again as usual. My success as a guru is that people love to know that there is someone out there who knows even less than they do. I think.

I rush back home, it is an hour, and change into tracksuit and trainers and dash off to a photo shoot promoting a ladies only midnight walk in September. Despite the heavy red lipstick it's pretty convincing as I am so tired I look like I have already done the 10k. I meet Jenny who has cancer and cannot make plans for a September she is unlikely to see. She has made a modest wish list. When she met Prince Charles she asked to see his garden and had a lovely day at Highgrove. Now she wants coffee with me. I don't cry in front of her but when I get in the car I bang my head again on the sun visor.

At home I change – again – and go to the gym. A man is there who has complained about my grunting with the weights. He is joking but Zoe (personal trainer) has warned him that I am a demon for revenge. She does not know the half. When my first marriage ended after twenty years I took very little. (Well, in a moment of sentimentality I took the two children and the dog.) But I did take a little brown etching that I had bought early on in a sale. I am not thought to be a very visual person so I was chuffed when I found that this dull, water stained piece was by Rembrandt and called 'Merchant knocking at the door.' Frankly it could have been anything. Later I took it to a museum and they opened a drawer stuffed with identical others. It had no great financial value but it seemed to me that by all that is fair that it belonged to me. When we were living apart my husband regularly telephoned to ask about the etching. Stubbornly I hung on to it for several years. One day he telephoned when I was working at home. My then secretary reported that she was afraid. I banged down the phone, pulled the etching from the wall, flew out to the car and drove into Cambridge. At my husband's college I asked to see the Bursar. I told him that my husband wished to make a gift of the etching to the college but on the condition that it was not an anonymous donation and that my husband should be thanked in writing. It sits there now on the wall, I think, hopefully, with a little brass notice acknowledging the generosity of the benefactor.

Do not cross me, man at the gym.

Returning to the car a little pale Labrador puppy strolls up to me. She is adorable. It goes through my mind to open the car and pop her in. Creatures have come to me before like this and I have been saying that I will have a dog 'if one just turns up.' Sighing, I gather three girls to track down the owner. I am half-hearted. I knock, very quietly, almost silently at doors, 'oops, they aren't at home'. I don't want to find the owner. I can understand why girls in Croydon want babies. Finally a gardener claims the little girl, I have already tried out names – Hortense, Molly, Beryl – she answers to all of them, and I am desolate.

I call in at the Co-op. All I need is milk but it takes one and a half hours. The day before The Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard has printed my column about the NHS. Everyone wants to tell me their story about hospitals and illness and dying. Some say I should be more careful, others that I should have gone further.

At home I drink my first real coffee of the day and I catch up. I answer every email and every letter sent to me. I am fascinated by the detail that people pick up on and how, generally, sympathetic and open they are. Not like the woman who attacked me when I parked my car. She and others were standing in the road. I drew in and waited, doing and saying nothing, and actually thinking of other things. She came to the window and screamed abuse at me. 'How much of the road do you want...swear...swear...' Those looking on will have thought that I was the one in the wrong, as I was the one sitting in the lethal weapon. I care too much what people think. Her face is ugly with anger (and not blessed in any case) and I am afraid and shocked. I say nothing. It isn't about me, it is about one very angry lady. Perhaps I should invite her for coffee with Jenny, but Jenny doesn't deserve that.

I talk on a forum. I have made good, unseen, friends there but still a newcomer asks why I don't buy a second-hand treadmill and install it at home where I could run in my pyjamas. The horror of it. Not everyone can understand me.

I have bought bread. Walnut and date. That and golden butter is one reason I am not Kate Moss. At least I serve it with asparagus, chorizo and a cheese sauce (for all of which I have a passion at the moment) so I am covering all dietary options. Except slimming. I watch Mr Brain. I worry all the time. Love is 90 per cent joy, 10 percent fear. Sometimes it can be the other way round.

Lunch over, I consider the books by my desk. I was given 'Notes to my mother-in-law' by Phyllida Law by my own daughter-in-law for Christmas. I dip in to it. It is packed full of humour and kindness just what I need after Bloated Angry Lady. My sister has given me 'Beyond Ugly' by Constance Briscoe which is a follow-up to her successful book 'Ugly'. My sister themes her presents to me and two years ago ugly was the motif. In the parcel was Jade Goody's perfume, 'Shh...' which proved to be surprisingly delicious. I shall save 'Beyond Ugly, surviving a loveless childhood' until I am feeling stronger. It sounds just a tad too close to home for comfort.

I stroke a beautiful book, 'Charles Dickens's England' with a foreword by Derek Jacobi. I am surprised he is still alive. Jacobi, that is. He must have been 10 when he starred in 'I,Claudius.' How thrilled and disappointed Dickens would be if he came back for a day or two. So much he would love - television, cinema, the internet – how much would make his despair – child poverty, 'modern' warfare, angry women. I save the book for a special day. It deserves calm and quiet and graciousness. When I had finally parked this morning I nipped into the bookshop and bought Martin Amis' 'The Pregnant Widow'. The girl in Waterstone's was angry, too. Angry about Amis who she had seen being interviewed. It was as though he had come into the store and abused her personally. She hopes that the book is awful as she would hate to think that someone 'so nasty' should write a wonderful book. I promised to return and tell her what I think. 'I could get sacked for saying what I think,' she said. To be angry about a writer, about a book, about ideas seems noble and unsackable to me. It occurs to me as I read about Amis that here is yet another example of snobbery. If I am interested in Amis' private life I am merely intellectually curious, wishing to glean a greater understanding of who the Independent on Sunday calls 'The finest English fiction writer of his generation.' (and who would argue with such an authority??) The Times is bolder. David Aaronovitch calls him, 'Possibly the most fully engaged writer of our age.' I love the 'possibly'.!!! But to be interested in the love-less sex lives of footballers would be deemed the fodder of the 'gutter press'. I read that one WAG put up with the infidelities of her footballer boyfriend because she liked the restaurants. It turns out she meant 'Nobu'...to whore and victimize yourself for a meal at Nobu would indeed distress Dickens. Actually I am interested in neither Amis nor Terry since they have in common that they are completely without humour. But I must read the book.

I set aside the books and listen to the breakfast show of that morning, so very long ago now, repeated on iplayer. (As I listen I make a cheesecake – the recipe for which I shall enclose one day – it is totally fabby.) This is the first time I have done this. Perhaps because it is clear that the show is meant as background to the hustle and bustle of preparing for school and work. I open the file of the Great British Novel that I am writing. It is beautiful. Not the novel but the file. Matt black. The few immaculate pages proving cperhaps that the author is a better typist than writer. My heroine stands outside the Ashmolean. The sun catches the copper highlights in her hair but she shudders at the sight of her lover as he turns the corner, hurrying towards her unaware that this is the last time they will meet. She has been standing there for three weeks. All coppery and shuddering. Not because she is indecisive but because I have been too busy to move her on. Don't worry, Bella, I shall clear the decks and be with you soon.

My performance on the radio comes as a huge shock to me. I laugh. I laugh a lot. I make jokes. I am just a string of one-liners. I am happy. I am free to say this because the person on the radio cannot possibly be me. I rush to speak to Mr Brain, who today is engaged on a potential development project we might be taking on – which is exciting – and making more phone calls about his lost medical files – which is not. I tell him about my discovery. I laugh a lot. He is surprised by my surprise. He tells me that I laugh ALL THE TIME. I rush to my friend and ask her if I laugh. Yes, she says, you laugh ALL THE TIME and make everybody else laugh. THAT IS WHAT YOU DO. This is all terribly shocking. Clever people – Amis proves this – do not laugh and don't make other people laugh. I would SO like to be clever.

In the evening I change again. I should be in pantomime. Perhaps I am. I am taken to another county to appear on an Any Questions panel. Not the television one, you understand, but one that starts with a fish supper. Unhampered by knowledge I speak convincingly and seriously about global politics, lawnmowers, John Ruddy Terry, why we should vote, pot holes caused through cold weather, and a report by the National Audit Office that says we die as a result of poor trauma treatment in the NHS. I am determined not to laugh but dismayed when others do. It simply can't be helped.

On the way home – it is now 11 at night – I fall asleep. When I awake I have dribble on my chin. I think it is mine.

End of the day.

Copyright of website, photographs and text Lesley Brain