I love the way my character Hazel Fauld speaks sometimes. Of course in theory I write her, but I’m never entirely sure she doesn’t just use my fingers to type her life. Here is her description of getting the news that one of her lesbian couple Mums has gone into labour:

“It began to look as though Deb might need to be induced, but then came March the twenty-fourth. I was at school. It was almost the end of double Games with Queen Bitch. As ever, after a freezing hockey class with drizzle, Miss Baxter and Jenny Marlow still managed to look warm and dry. But the rest of us were drenched and Queenie was being even more of a harridan than usual as she screamed at a class of dispirited girls to try harder, run faster and generally become superhuman. I was looking forward to a nice hot shower in the changing rooms, followed by a crafty lunchtime cigarette, when Miss Bridges the usually stern-faced School Secretary came tearing down the touchline, flustered enough to commit the faux-pas of heading straight for me, rather than going through Miss Baxter.
“Ah, Miss Fauld,” she gasped as she reached me. “I’m afraid your mother just rang, Dear.  She says will you go home at once. Apparently your, did she say ‘other mother’? is being rushed to hospital. I’m afraid she didn’t say what was wrong, but I think you’d better go straight away.”
“I expect she’s gone into labour,” I said. “It’s about time. She’s over a week late.”
Miss Bridges gave me one of those looks that said I was being cheeky and in rather poor taste. In her experience, giving birth was the sort of thing that the forty-eight year old mothers of Upper Sixth-formers had largely grown out of.”