Ellen likes wine, shoes and reminiscing about times in her life that involved Fun and Frolics rather than refereeing fights over who had the remote first. It was also moving as were the parts about how the supposedly perfect, beautiful people really feel inside. Ellen often feels fed up and cross with Simon who is always too tired to help out in the evening or at the weekends, despite the fact that Ellen also works part-time.

I reminded myself that I must be glad for Jane that even if her boyfriend’s parents had ridiculous taste when it came to naming their children, that at least they went some way to making up for that by being obscenely rich. For parents of young children, or who remember having young children, this will likely entertain and cause nods of familiarity in equal measure.Oh my God, Mother, it’s only bloody Verbier, will you stop saying “Abroad” like a xenophobic Nancy Mitford character? Simon’s parents Sylvia and Michael rang to say that they’d been invited to spend Christmas with some dear chums who had the most charming little bijou château in the Dordogne. Once I had managed to decipher this garbled missive (‘Dearest Mamma, I have decided not to nestle in the bosom of my loving famille for the festive period, as I shall instead be getting utterly off my tits on a Thai beach and possibly contracting a hopefully not-penicillin-resistant STD. His plaintive cries when failing to cope with his little dears if Mummy is out for a while made me laugh and I think that many stay at home parents will recognise the other parent not really understanding just what they do all day with the children. The novel follows Mummy, Ellen, throughout a year and is written in the form of a diary as she tries to be more organised and less frazzled!

I should revel in the lack of mounds of potatoes to be peeled and the bickering over bread sauce and the panic about whether the famous jar of pickled beetroot my grandmother bestowed upon Christmas sometime around 1989, and that is reverently brought out and not eaten each year, has finally gone mouldy. Surely in a just world, the little girl who brought joy to the sorrowing hearts of an entire town wouldn’t get run over in the first place!There are several areas if this book that I feel could have been lifted straight out of my life, although I don't have a sister in law with 6 kids who thinks nothing gif turning up unannounced or with little warning. And so every December I’d once again be belting out ‘Hark the Herald Angels’ and sobbing over ‘Silent Night’ while trying to cope with everyone else’s agendas, ideas, expectations, traditions, issues, anxieties, allergies or intolerances (unfortunately both food- and race related in the case of my ghastly stepfather Geoffrey), and flinging mistletoe and holly around with wild abandon. And I had just read the chapter about getting the little ones ready for school before I woke my little one up, and no matter how organised you try to be there is always something you are racing around the house looking for at the last minute. There were some worrying passages, particularly with Gadget Twat, not least because I see a lot of myself in him - my wife might say she sees even more :) - but I think that they were necessary in the overall structure of the book.

In the book Mummy is constantly thwarted in her efforts to have well turned out, well rounded children who she has delightful little chats with and goes on lovely walks in the countryside with. The four Why Mummy titles have sold nearly a million copies across all formats to date and are published in eighteen territories worldwide.But this year it was going to be just us, and they’re both old enough to drink and so I hoped I could put on my cashmere jumper and we could all go to the pub and drink mulled wine and BE FUCKING FESTIVE. I demanded, immediately suspicious of such compliance in the face of Simon’s well-known miserliness and loathing of the human race. And now Jane would rather go off to some bastarding Winter Wonderland IN ABROAD (where even was Verbier, I wondered dimly through my tears.

If you feel that you're not one of the 'in gang' and that everyone else's lives are going much more smoothly than yours then you'll find you are not alone.

The plot’s a bit daft, featuring at least one completely ridiculous character, and a bit slim, too, but this is a diary and the fun is found in the details and the nods of recognition for mums caught up in a similar life stage. Gill’s interests include drinking wine, wasting time on social media, trying and failing to recapture her lost youth and looking for one of the dogs when he decides to go on one of his regular jaunts, while trying to stop the other one eating unspeakable things. If you follow Peter and Jane you will already know how hilarious each post is as this exhausted mum tries to balance working, looking after the house and dealing with her 'precious moppets' and invariably ends each day with a drink of something and a photo of said drink - and Judgy Dog of course. And if you like the sound of ‘Why Mummy Drinks’, then you’ll be pleased to hear that a follow-up, ‘Why Mummy Swears’, will be published later this year.