With the Winter Olympics dominating our screens, we should all be inspired to perfect the art of pottering

With the Winter Olympics in full upside down somersault I find myself in the weird limbo of being between tours. A couple of weeks ago I finished a solo tour, which had run for two and a half years, while next month I go into rehearsals for a sixty date Grumpy Old Women tour. In my experience, this month-long hiatus between the two shows is the calm before the storm.

There are many things I could be doing: the hard little bodies of the Olympic athletes remind me that I should get down to the gym or at least get in a few pilates classes – pilates being the exercise of choice for the middle-aged woman who can just about hack an hour of lying on a mat by the radiators thinking about what to have for tea.

Alternatively I could quickly whip around every gallery and museum in London and top up my Smugoxedrine levels before I’m back on the road and don’t have time for any culture. “Smugoxedrine”, by the way, is a hormone that middle-class people secrete when they have seen an art exhibition or a play.

But a peculiar torpor grips me: I don’t really want to leave the house, I’m basically in hibernation mode.

In fact, rather than sloping off for a nap with a hot water bottle every afternoon, maybe I should go the whole hog and drag that empty Zanussi fridge freezer in from the garage and lay myself down in some old newspaper until March when the line learning starts in earnest.

Instead I am spending my days pottering, and rather than feeling guilty about the time spent crumbling up stale bread and watching as the cheeky robin fights off the fat pigeons, I have decided to take my pottering seriously. I think its an underrated sport.

OK, so it might not generate as much high drama as the speed skating on my telly, but I could quite easily break my collarbone falling off a kitchen chair while I clear out my cupboards.

Before anyone confuses pottering with spring cleaning, let me assure you, I am not doing any heavy lifting. Rather than moving any furniture, I am gently skimming the surface. Yesterday I purged our house of anything that was beyond its sell by date.

Now I may not have been up against any official Olympic clock but even so, I managed the medicine cabinet and food cupboards in just under two hours, which for me, is a personal best.

I may not have any idea what it’s like to hurtle down a ski slope at a million miles an hour, but I can tell you I felt a profound sense of achievement when I hurled a bulging bin liner full of dried up bottles of calamine lotion, baby Calpol (my daughter is 28) and “best before 2011” tins of black-eyed beans into the bin. In fact I phoned my mother so that she could be the first to congratulate me.

The great thing about pottering is that it can take on many forms. Take, for example, Pentathlon Pottering, which might include tidying your underwear drawer, (extra points for throwing away pants with holes), some soup making (I find my curried lentil and carrot puts me ahead of the field), sorting out the receipts that are making it impossible to close your purse, and filing away the ones you can put against your tax bill (I like to employ an imaginative use of stationary, maybe with the use of some novelty paper clips, which surely gains me some bonus points), then going outside to see if those tulip bulbs you planted just after Christmas are showing any signs of growth (a disappointing result here for Eclair, I’m sorry to say), followed by twenty minutes in the armchair doing a spot of tapestry.

Suffice to say that while my “three birds on a floral background” might not be in a world-beating class of its own, it will make a very nice cushion for my sister’s sofa.

Obviously, like any athlete, I have to eat well to keep up my pottering stamina. I find three meals a day keeps me going, plus extra snacks such as that delicious cheese that makes kissing noises at me from the fridge, and a bag of crisps or popcorn, some of which I may later find lodged in my bra – snack skills, people.

As for pottering clothing, I find loose is best. While some potterers may opt for state-of-the-art trainers, I find slippers work just as well.

Of course, as in any competitive sport, knowing how to wind down after a long hard potter is very important. Most experts agree that easing the muscles in a hot bath with fragrant oils does the trick. I usually follow this with a good stretch out on the sofa with a couple of glasses of red wine, which we all know contains loads of iron and is therefore vital for anyone who is seriously thinking of competing for the Winter Olympics Pottering gold. Good luck all.