Steven Poliakov, daughters, grieving friends and Saudi princesses

I have to say it, even though I can feel the stinging e-rebukes heading my way before I have even finished the sentence ... Steven Poliakov is the thinking man's/woman's Eastenders. I am obsessed by his plays and if there were one on TV every evening - omnibus on Saturdays - I would be eating my TV dinners in front of it,(just to ensure I did not miss a single word);

Last night we, Paul, Lucy and I, watched 'Shooting the Past', another absolute masterpiece with three of my favourite actors - Lindsay Duncan, Timothy Spall, and Billie Whitelaw. What is it about his writing that scores straight through to the subconscious? The plot? The characters? The situation? The direction and lighting - particularly in 'Shooting the Past' - that lifts the mundane into the memorable? Or is it just all of these in their uniquely Poliakov measures? I would sell my soul to write like him, but no one would buy it and I would always know that he had got there first.

And so to daughters and more specifically teenage daughters who get drunk and vomit (vastly) through the night. Never having been very good with any kind of bodily fluids and definitely not fluids filled with red kidney beans, I surprised myself by calmly telling her to go and have a shower while I scooped up the sheets and their contents. Though I dealt less well with the reason for her being drunk.

My darling Lucy is terminally unhappy while I stand powerlessly by. If pain could be packaged up and handed over to someone else, life would be so much better. A more effective punishment for murderers or rapists who would actually experience their victim's torture and a means of release for sufferers and the people who care about them. But this is just a fantasy while Lucy's depression is all too real. She hates her body, hates her image (as she sees it) and doesn't seem able to look beyond the black. Worse still, having been there myself (still am in some ways), I recognise a large percentage of what she is going through and feel utterly to blame - genetically and parentally.

And so on to Saudi princesses (current because the U.K has just received a royal visitation in the form of King Abdullah) and women whose treatment by their Saudi men - revealed in the book 'Daughters of Arabia' (which I am reading) - is frankly unimaginable. No, incomprehensible.

And so onto grieving friends. In my darker moments, usually prompted by either Lucy herself or a tragic news story, I have a brief glimpse of the desolated landscape left to a grieving parent. How could I go on living if anything happened to Lucy, or worse still as in Catherine's case, my child were to commit suicide? Nothing in my experience has equipped me to deal with this personally and I am accordingly useless when it comes to helping Catherine. What can I do or say to support her through to a presumably less inconsolable future? Why do I always seem to be standing pathetically on the sidelines? As I write I have an image of a wild women, bare legs and staring hair, screaming abuse at the sky.

And so on to the rest of the day (an unimpeded process that makes the last few day's events even more intolerable), the sun is shining, but Paul and I are hunched over our respective computers, we have acquired four more ducks (while their owners are in the UK for the winter)we are about to lose Ollie, the bulimic cat (because he is going back to Karen, the mouse under our kitchen sink has perfected the art of stealing cheese without springing the trap and the chickens are laying again.