I think the pressure to be perfect generally in life has amped up massively in the last twenty years: especially for young people with the advent of social media.

I will not get upset over men, but instead be poised and cool ice-queen.

I had my daughter by C-section, so knew when and where she was going to be born. I got freakishly organized and prepared a group e-mail birth announcement. Unfortunately, I accidentally pressed Send All. I then had to send another e-mail saying, "I'm really sorry but I haven't actually had the baby yet." Then, when I actually did have the baby, I felt too embarrassed to send another e-mail saying, "I've definitely had the baby now."

As Bridget writes to her son, in Bridget Jones' Baby - "if you just keep calm and keep your spirits up, things have a habit of turning out all right, just as they did for me."

I was writing an earnest novel about cruises in the Caribbean and I just started writing 'Bridget Jones' to get some money, to finance this earnest work, and then I chucked it out.

Bridget Jones' Baby, at heart is about the gap between how you expect life to turn out and how it actually does.

Quite quickly I grew less deranged. I had begun the process of calming down, assimilating and compromising, which is necessary to live comfortably in the world as it is, and probably is why its imbalance never changes. But underneath, my idea of life was completely altered.