Highlights of the reviews so far:

From Melissa Katsoulis in The Times: 'William Nicholson is a gentleman of a certain age who lives in the country and writes novels about marriage... and has produced half-a-dozen well-regarded novels about contemporary life... Nicholson's insight into the female mind is uncanny and shows that he is a man who really listens when women talk... hard truths unearthed in this honest summation of heterosexual mores.'

From Alan Massie in The Scotsman: 'William Nicholson is a master of the ordinary... Anthony Trollope, the master of the novel of the everyday, gave perhaps his greatest novel the title 'The Way We Live Now'. That is Nicholson's subject too, and he has so thoroughly and credibly imagined his characters, their families, homes, careers, hopes, fears and lingering ambitions that he gives us an illuminating and penetrating picture of one part of modern English life in one section of society... Nicholson is a masterly writer, and this is a thoroughly engaging novel.'

My new novel, 'Adventures in Modern Marriage', is now published, and the first review, in the Times of Saturday January 14 2017, has appeared. It's the kind of review an author dreams of, and before things get worse, as tends to happen, I want to pause and enjoy the sweet moment. I was on the day flight returning from New York when the review appeared. I knew it was due, but was unable to access it because I was in mid-air. The result was an almost ridiculous seven hours of anxiety. Why should one review, in one paper, at this late stage of my career, have the power to make me so anxious? Well, it's the first, for this book. And the waiting made it harder, knowing it was out there, being read by others and not by me. And I suppose I was bracing myself, in a kind of protective flinch, for the pain of a poor review. After all, there are as many opinions as there are reviewers, and I had no way of knowing how this individual would respond. Virginia offered to wait for the luggage to come off the carousel, and I raced ahead to WHSmith in Terminal 5 Arrivals to seize the last copy of the Times. And there it was, like a late birthday present (I turned 69 last Thursday).

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Not so long ago I found myself listening with fascination to a radio piece by Tom Service in which he explained, as I felt to me personally, what had happened to serious music in the 20th century. I've always felt guilty that I have so little understanding of the work of so many celebrated composers, of whom Stockhausen is a prime example. Little understanding, and no love. Worse than that, I react with a dislike that is downright suspicious. Tom Service explained all to me. Stockhausen and others were attempting to free themselves from the stale grip of the musical tradition they had inherited, which, they felt, condemned them to repeat old patterns ad nauseam. They wanted to make new music, but found themselves trapped by the existing musical forms. Every arrangement of notes seemed to be no more than an echo of a composer from the past. Stockhausen's solution was to banish the very basis of melody itself: repetition. He ordained that in his work no note would ever be used more than once. At a stroke this put an end to what we had understood to be melody. One simple rule - no repetition - killed all patterns that, for example, begin and return to the same point.

For several weeks now I've been sitting for my portrait. I met the artist, Charlie Schaffer, through my daughter Maria, and was very impressed by his work. He's still relatively new, but passionately committed, not only to painting, but to portraiture. Being painted by him - six sessions, each about three hours, was a fascinating process. He started work not by roughly sketching my whole head, but by painting one small part of one eye. He says his entire technique is based on close looking. Little by little a part of my nose appeared, then part of the other eye. The extraordinary thing was, I could recognise myself even in such a fragment. You can take a look by clicking on the button below, or by going to the Bio page on this site.

I’ve been reading Montaigne. So long as you skip straight past all the chunks of Latin he inserts, I think because he fears his own thoughts are not sufficiently authoritative, there are some glorious moments. Here is his central statement: “The world always looks outwards. I turn my gaze inward. There I fix it, and there keep it busy. Everyone looks before him; I look within. I have no business but with myself, I unceasingly consider, examine and analyse myself. Others, if they will but see, are always going elsewhere; they are always going forward. But I revolve within myself.”

I’m just home from a few days in Los Angeles, going to meetings related to my TV series, and because my trip was short I did what I’ve done before, and stayed roughly on UK time. This meant having no meetings after 4pm, and going to bed as soon after that as possible; so simulating a late night at home. So far so good. However, as a consequence, I wake at 1am in my hotel room with eight empty hours yawning before me before my day’s business will begin.

A perfect opportunity to catch up with writing, of course. Except I don’t. Something about hotel rooms renders me floppy. And the surprising truth is that I’m capable of doing lots of nothing. So I decided to jot down a list of the various forms of nothing that occupied me one night. Here it is:

Today I turn 68: not a very memorable age, but within spitting distance of 70, which has to be counted as old age. And yet I don’t feel old. Of course this is commonplace among the ageing, and is part of the armoury of self-delusion which keeps us going. But there’s another reason too. For so much of our life we live through such tumultuous change, as the baby becomes a child, as the youth becomes an adult, as we make our rackety way to a sort of maturity: at which point, or so it seems to me, everything settles down, and from this time onwards, nothing changes. This second part of life began for me at about the age of 40, when I got married and took on the life of a professional writer. As a result I’ve felt much the same age ever since. The thought that I’ve in fact grown older seems not only improbable but unfair. Am I now to endure a dismantling as prolonged and uncomfortable as the making of me?

Soon I must vote for Oscars and BAFTAs, so I've been having marathon screening sessions. Top of my list so far is ROOM, which is brilliant in every way. The boy actor, Jacob Tremblay, is astounding. But most of all, it's a film that never stoops to the rigged mini-plots so often used to generate viewer excitement: it goes its own way, always surprising, always utterly believable. The writer of both the novel and the screenplay, Emma Donoghue, has produced a perfect work. People seem surprised that a first-time screenwriter can be so good, but the truth is screenwriting's not hard, it's having something strong and real and true to write about that's hard. Emma Donoghue is original and wise: that's rare.