On the bus, you hear someone say into his mobile phone: "We're not moving . . . it's a hostage situation"

The book of the season is Robert Skidelsky's third volume of his life of Maynard Keynes. Wherever I go, people are talking about it and its revelation about our much-vaunted special relationship with the United States. The revelation is that we didn't have one. They talk about this at the New Statesman lunch, on the radio and at Christmas parties. I have dipped into this volume, but I fear I am like the young Canadian poet and diplomat Douglas LePan, with whom Keynes dined in King's College, Cambridge, in May 1945 - I simply can't get my mind round the economics. Keynes, noticing LePan's problems, quickly took pity on him and moved the conversation to ballet. And so I skip through the volume, looking for the bits about the ballet and Virginia Woolf. It is a sadness to me that I cannot understand economics. I should never have been allowed to drop mathematics at the age of 12. Shall I sue my old school for negligence? That is the fashion these days, but it seems a little late for that kind of thing.

Robert's wife Gus says she doesn't understand economics either, though she has lived with them for so long. She teaches basic maths to prisoners. I wish she would teach them to me. She also teaches them how to cook. They are very lucky prisoners. This month I went round Wandsworth prison with the Howard League for Penal Reform, and was deeply impressed and depressed by the ancient brickwork, the thick wooden doors and the surreal cardboard tables and chairs of the punishment block. The prisoners we were allowed to meet seemed in good spirits, and their lunch was quite edible, though not as good as Gus's. Over vegetable lasagne we discussed the Prison Magazine and images of prison on TV and the shortage of power points in the unrefurbished wings. I see there is a move to sell off these old Victorian prisons and convert them into luxury flats. This is an interesting idea. They will attract some curious customers, with a taste for the Gothic.

I find I can't avoid the subject of the weather. Will it stop raining in 2001? This has been the most dismal year, and December was the worst month of all. Every time you go out, you get soaked through. It's like living in the underworld of Blade Runner. Public transport regularly comes to a halt. The Tube stops, and you're told the Hammersmith and City Line has changed its mind and turned into the Circle Line, and you've got to get off. You sit on top of a Number 7 bus by Paddington station, immobile for a quarter of an hour, listening to other people talking on mobile phones. "I'm on top of a bus. We don't seem to be going anywhere. The police are out there. I think it's a hostage situation" - all this delivered in a tone of laconic boredom. Ken and Kiley, help us. London has urgent need of you.

Why do I so obstinately keep travelling by public transport? Because of my wondrous Freedom Pass. I love it. It is delightful to be able to hop on and off buses and travel on the Underground for nothing. This is the one glory of being an OAP in London. Indeed, this local scheme should be nationwide. It is true that I use my car less since I turned 60.

In the New Year, I am running away from rain-sodden London to an even wetter place. I am off to Venice, where water belongs. I am going there partly to avoid the publication of my new novel, The Peppered Moth, which comes out this month. I shall forget all about it in Venice. A recent sociological survey claims that Venice has become a favoured suicide spot, attracting from all over the world those who have had enough of the Number 7 bus or literary gossip or worse afflictions. I am pursuing not death in Venice, but life in Venice. In the words of the poet William Dunlop, I shall "grin like a dog and run around the city".

The Peppered Moth was not easy to write. It took me back into family history, and unhappy ghosts of Christmas past. It is a four-generation novel, and the early chapters are set in South Yorkshire, where my parents were born. I am vainly hoping that William Hague, who grew up just along the road in Wath-on-Dearne, will read my lament for the abandoned South Yorkshire coalfields and my song of praise for the millennial Don Valley Earth Project. He represents a pleasant rural constituency in North Yorkshire, but he must remember what it was like in the industrial wasteland.

Not many novels mention Wath-on-Dearne.

My aunt's best friend, Gertie, lived in Wath. A version of my aunt features in this novel, and so do many of her stories. She will not read it, for she is now in a nursing home and neither her sight nor her hearing are good, though she still recognises my ex, Clive Swift, when he pops up on television. I hope she knows how much we all owe to her. She had no children, but she devoted much time to her nieces and nephew. She was a primary school teacher, and she taught us to sew and knit and make rock buns and play patience and do jigsaws. Every time I play solitaire on my laptop, which is more often than I should, I can hear her voice urging me on. "Oh, look, Margaret, it's building up nicely. Oh, well done." My mother never liked games, and I don't think she really liked children, although she had four. The distributions of fate are mysterious. My novel asks questions about this, but I haven't many answers.

Margaret Drabble's new novel is reviewed on page 43