“Who wants to know a secret?” he teased at midnight New York time, 5.00 am here in the UK.

Two hours later, when the mainstream media had caught up with Twitter, the Today programme played a 50-second snatch of Where Are We Now, the haunting new single released by Bowie today – his 66^th birthday.

The man who broke most social and cultural taboos in his early career is now a national icon, a treasure even.

I was an early adopter, joining the Bowie fan club back in 1970, as a gauche 13 year old looking for some meaning in my rural backwater. I got a letter of welcome from his then wife Angie – a piece of history I managed to lose in my frantic, early adult years.

The rest of the world caught up with me when the man who changed the world burst into the nation’s living rooms in the summer of 1972 .

He and Mick Ronson flirted their way through Starman on Top of the Pops and thousands of teenagers across the UK, gay, straight, confused, fell in love with Bowie. Many of us have remained faithful.

I last saw him live in Glasgow, just before the heart attack that forced him to retreat to his New York apartment.

I never thought I would experience the thrill of a new Bowie single, or suffer the anticipation of a new album again. I thought he was too ill, or worn out, or simply had had enough.

We might have know that our hero was working. Thinking about his life. Our lives.

The video for Where Are We Know is haunting. It made me cry, it makes me sad thinking about it. Bowie’s face is etched with sadness, pain, fear even. There is no blue eyeshadow. No wham, bam thank you ma’am. Just an older man, “walking the dead”.

Time may ch-ch-change all of us, but David Bowie is still the coolest man on the planet.

I am not looking forward to 2013. Let me qualify that. I am looking forward to lots of things in 2013. Spending time with my grandchildren. Working in Malawi. Hopefully enjoying the Greek sunshine with my husband. Planting more lavender bushes. The occasional rummage round TK Maxx. Suppers with friends.

There are a lot to things to look forward to, not least more bars of Green and Blacks Milk Chocolate with Sea Salt. Try it, it is sublime.

What I am dreading is the increasingly strident debate about Scotland’s place in the UK as we stumble towards the 2014 referendum.

Let me put my cards firmly on the table. I love being part of the UK family, this muddle of people from across the world and across the water that makes up Britain. It is the greatest country in the world. I may yearn to live in New York, or Malawi, or in a flat with a view of the Parthenon, but at heart I am happiest in the UK.

Like most Brits I am a mongrel. My grandfathers were both Irish. My grandmothers Scottish. I am married to an Englishman whose family rarely strayed from outside the north Midlands until the Second World War.

I also love a good argument, more than most people, which is probably why I have been involved in politics in one guise or another for most of my adult life.

But while I relish fighting for social and economic justice, I really don’t want to engage in a destructive argument about whether or not Scotland should be independent.

I have no doubt Scotland could be independent. There are many small countries of five million people or less who manage, some better than others.

However, I am already a citizen of a great country – the United Kingdom – and I don’t see why I should have to fight for my right to remain British just because a minority of Scots want to separate.

The recent intervention by the writer Alasdair Gray who attacks English “colonists” who come to Scotland to “advance their career” fills me with dread.

As the economic arguments against independence start to mount up, I worry that more supporters of separation, in their desperation to win the referendum, will, like Gray, resort to the politics of national identity.

That would truly be a recipe for disaster and could scar our nation, our still united nation, for a very long time to come.

Goodness me, the poorest I’ve ever been…

I grew up in poverty. My father worked on farms. Ploughman was his job title, but he did far more. Animal husbandry. Crops. Managed staff. He was paid a pittance, his poverty wages supplemented by bags of potatoes and coal and the tenure of a series of damp, poky farm cottages that my mother somehow transformed into warm, cosy homes.

We knew we were poor, we couldn’t help but know it. But it didn’t scar us, too much.

There were times, when as a young single parent I struggled to stretch my weekly income to over the basics. My mother still laughs when she recalls my favourite cook book of the time, 101 Ways to Cook Mince, and there were nights when I couldn’t sleep for worry about how I was going to pay the electricity bill or buy new shoes for my growing boys.

I knew we were poor. But it didn’t scar us, too much.

And there have been times in recent years when, despite my husband and I both earning well above the average income, I struggled to pay my credit cards, or had to resort to using a credit card to pay for the essentials of life, and not just Jo Malone candles.

Like millions of others, including, I am sad to say, the last Labour government, I fell for the smooth talking marketing men who promised me, and the country, that we could enjoy never-ending growth simply by borrowing more.

Gordon Brown paid through the nose for much needed new schools and hospitals. I bought Prada handbags. I suppose that makes him a better person, but I was better dressed.

So even when I was richer than my father could have ever dreamed of, I knew I was really poor.

And now, five years after the world economy almost collapsed, thanks to the lies peddled by those smooth talking marketing men and my husband and I blew the last of our savings on a mid-life gap year, I am a freelancer.

Do I feel poor?

Well, I have no job security, and plan only three months ahead.

I have no savings (my premium bonds don’t really count).

And I haven’t been in Harvey Nicks for a very long time.

But I no longer feel poor. Because poverty is not having access to clean water. It’s having nothing to eat but maize porridge. It is being unable to treat your baby’s illness because you can’t afford to buy medicine.

It’s sleeping in a shop doorway. Its being forced to move out of your home because you have a spare bedroom. It’s switching off the heating in the winter because you can’t pay the gas bill.

I don’t feel rich either, despite those guilty Prada handbags hiding in the cupboard.

I feel alright. And it’s quite a nice place to be.

Write a song…no chance. I can’t sing, so writing a song is a mysterious process that I have never attempted. And never will.

I have never been tempted, not even when I was in the depths of despair over some failed romance (many, many years ago) and would relentlessly replay “our” favourite songs. Songwriting, like HTML code, is something I leave to the experts.

Listening to songs, now that is a different matter.

I am not an obsessive, like my husband. He has thousands, and thousands of tracks on his iPod, iPad and iPhone. He never has a day without music.

I dip in and out. And get passions. My current favourite is Bruce Springsteen’s Wrecking Ball which according to Rolling Stone, is Springsteen’s most “despairing, confrontational and musically turbulent” album.

It may well be…I also find it uplifting, because underneath his rage at the economic havoc wreaked by an uncaring elite, lies optimism. A bitter, twisted optimism perhaps, but still I find it makes my spirit soar, as well as my hackles rise.

My favourite song is Jack of All Trades, which makes me cry every time I hear it. It is about my father, my husband and my sons, and every father, husband and son who has worked his fingers to the bone to look after his family.

The banker man grows fatter, the working man grows thin
It’s all happened before and it’ll happen again
It’ll happen again, they’ll bet your life
I’m a Jack of all trades and, darling, we’ll be alright

Now sometimes tomorrow comes soaked in treasure and blood
Here we stood the drought, now we’ll stand the flood
There’s a new world coming, I can see the light
I’m a Jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

So you use what you’ve got, and you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun, I’d find the bastards and shoot ‘em on sight
I’m a Jack of all trades, we’ll be alright
I’m a Jack of all trades, we’ll be alright

I don’t have a favourite recipe. I have favourite cook books. And my new favourite is Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi.

I always turn to Ottolenghi’s weekly recipe in the Guardian’s Saturday magazine, but had never really understood his magic until buying this book.

He and his partner Tamimi put their cooking firmly in context. This is as much a book about Jerusalem,  the city, its cultures and its people, as it is a cook book.

Just flicking through its gorgeous pages makes me want to visit this complex city and taste for myself its fusion of food from across the world.

And I am sure sweet potatoes, tomatoes and chickpeas will taste so much better in this ancient city than the ones I buy from my local supermarket.

But until I can persuade my husband that a city break in Jerusalem would be more fun than a wet weekend in West Yorkshire, I am just going to have to satisfy myself with cooking something from this fabulous book.

Tonight we are having Roasted Aubergine with Fried Onions and chopped lemon (p33).

Write an anonymous letter to a stranger detailing the things you’ve learned about life…

Things I’ve learned about life…mmm, let me think…in no particular order:

Don’t swear as much as I do. People often find it offensive.

Money is over-rated, except when you don’t have any. There is nothing noble about being poor, or in debt, or scrambling down the back of the sofa looking for 50p tomorrow’s lunch money. Nothing.

Pensions are important. Take it from one who is fast approaching an impoverished third age. As a member of the first cohort of women to achieve equality of retirement age (hurrah!) I cannot start claiming my state pension until I am 67. I have a measly civil service one which does start paying out when I am 60, but it will barely cover my credit card bill. My husband is five years younger than I, so I won’t benefit from his final salary public sector pension until I am….well, likely dead. The next decade is going to be interesting.

Children are hard work. Sweet smelling, chubby, smiling babies grow into rank, sour-faced, skinny teenagers. Then miraculously, just when you thought you had lost your sons forever, they blossom into hard-working, loving men, with families of their own. Was it worth it…yes, just. Would I do it again…mmm, I will get back to you on that one.

Very few people get to follow their dreams. Most of us end up working in dull jobs, simply to pay the rent/mortgage/Mastercard/taxman. Grab what happiness you can, but don’t deliberately harm people in the process.

Stand up to bullies. I always did, until I was bullied by an expert. I almost lost my soul. And it is still frayed around the edges.

New York is quite simply the best city in the world. No contest.

If you get the chance to visit sub-Saharan Africa, take it. It will change your life.

Red wine is essential to (my) life

You can have too many handbags/shoes/dresses/lip gloss

Your parents don’t always know best.

Being a grandmother is better than I thought it could be (and I had high expectations). Suddenly, your life makes sense.

You don’t get a second shot at life…this is it.

She was re-homed three years ago, at the age of eight. Which is pretty old for a cat to be plucked from her favourite lap (my husband’s) and plonked down on a stranger’s knee.

We thought long and hard before giving her up for adoption. I have always had cats, since I was born.

My first one was a huge tabby called Judy. Then there was the inimitable Topsy. A fluffy black and white cat with more personality than most people I know. She was a mean hunter too, bringing home everything from a screaming weasel to a young seagull.

I got Ziggy when my first child was a toddler. He is now a dad of three, and has his own cat, the very grumpy Misty.

Ziggy died of old age when she was twenty-one. She just got scraggier and scraggier, like the very old lady she was.

When she stopped eating Ben and Jerry’s ice-cream (any flavour, she was not fussy, but it had to be Ben and Jerry’s), I knew she was nearing the end.

She died, curled up on the kitchen floor, in front of the fire. I think she was happy.

Then Dusty came into our lives. A smokey grey kitten, terrified of everything. Except my husband.

Dusty was Nigel’s cat. She tolerated me, but only when I was about to feed her. She loved Nigel. And he loved her.

So when our peripatetic lifestyle became too peripatetic for her, we took the difficult decision to find her a new home.

It took a few months. Most people want a lively, young kitten. Not a prissy, middle aged, slightly overweight cat. But three years ago she moved to Fife.

So today, I hope my cat sees the world from the comfort of a plump lap, purring while her ears are gently, very gently rubbed, before sliding off for yet another bowl of Hill’s Light cat food.

I then began filling red Silvine notebooks with stories of rabbits, princesses and other fairy tales to amuse my younger sisters.

And when I reached my dangerous teenage years I filled Collins’ diaries with line after line of angst. I destroyed them all, thank god.

I have made my living writing every day. As chief writer for the Edinburgh Evening News I started writing at 7.00 am and kept going until around 4.30 pm, five days a week. After three years, I was ready for a change.

I wrote for seven months while on my mid-life gap year. I enjoyed that.

I have even toyed with writing a novel. There is half of one lying in a cupboard somewhere. I no longer have it on a memory stick. I may go back to it one day, but I am not a novelist. Andy Nicoll, author and political hack is a novelist, a damn fine one too. I am a hack.

I need prompts to get my creative juices flowing. A column deadline. A last minute request for an article on…well anything really. I have an opinion on everything. And anything.

I am not creative. As I said, I am a hack. Which is why today I bought 642 Things To Write About, a “writing” journal penned by members of the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto in a day.

It shows, some of the prompts are a bit trite, banal even. I am sure there are better ways to get my “creative juices flowing”, but as I said, I am a hack. This will do.

I have added a couple of my own rules. No post, here, or in the journal (such an American term) should be more than 400 words.  And I must try and complete one a week. Hardly an onerous deadline, though one I am sure I will miss, more than once.

And my first piece of homework…How your cat sees the world.

My husband Nigel is a Stoke boy, born and brought up in Tunstall. The city was once the centre of working class creativity in the UK, a place where men and women created things of great beauty from the clay beneath their feet. Today, it is one of the poorest cities in our country.

But evidence of Stoke’s great days are everywhere and yesterday we found a little piece of it in the streets of Philadelphia.

A little piece of Stoke in Philly

Nigel’s mother, Irene, worked as a young women in the small pottery of Hollinshead and Kirkham. It is not nearly as famous as Moorhead or Wedgewood, but the pieces created by artists such as R Groscott are beautiful and Clarice Cliff learned her trade there.

So we are delighted to stumble across this little dish in Mae Downs & Co, a tiny vintage shop in Pine Row.

It will never make us a fortune on the Antiques Roadshow, but it will make us smile every time we look at it.

President Obama’s victory on Tuesday will no doubt inspire commentators from the left, the right and the very big middle for weeks and months to come. I have nothing original to say that hasn’t been said elsewhere, so I will be brief.

• President Obama has big ears
• He does get stuff wrong, and no doubt at some point over the next four years he will make some bad calls
• He is just a man
• The American electoral process is dysfunctional, as is its system of governance
• I am not sure I would stand in line for seven hours to vote

That said Obama’s narrative needs to be the story of the 21st century: human beings come in all shapes and sizes, we achieve far more if we work together and, crucially our economies, social policies, justice systems should be founded on the needs and aspirations of the people.

We cannot build strong countries and tackle global problems such as climate change and hunger if we depend on the leftovers from big business. Trickle down doesn’t work, stupid.

Oh, and Michelle Obama is awesome.

Now I am off to Philadelphia.