If Rachel Reeves and her cohort bring in their suggested mansion tax, I will have to move out of my home.

The proposed annual levy of one per cent on properties worth over £2 million would mean finding cash I simply don’t have at 67.

OK, I hear you thinking, no one is going to shed any tears if you own a house worth that much. But hear me out. This is not just my house, but a bricks-and-mortar manifestation of 45 years of hard work.

As a child, my family lived in a rented London flat. Every year my parents, both freelance journalists, would worry they wouldn’t be able to pay the increased rent and off my father would go to the bank manager to wrangle an increased overdraft.

Those conversations, and the constant insecurity over whether we could stay in our home, made a deep impression on me.

If I had one motivation when I started my career, it was to work hard so I could buy somewhere and not be in the same situation as my parents.

Back in 1985, it was possible for a young professional to buy in London. I was able to get a 95 per cent mortgage and a kindly bank manager at my local NatWest had enough faith in me to lend me the extra five per cent – £2,250. Not a penny came from my family.

Over the years, I won better jobs with larger salaries, and larger mortgages enabled me as a single mother to turn that one-bedroom mousehole I bought into the comfortable five-bedroom terraced house I now have.

It has been my and my son’s home for 20 years, a bolthole for extended family, a place to host Christmas and celebrations, a refuge. And most importantly, a reminder that so many of the difficult times I faced as a full-time working single mother were worth it.

I will not be alone in having to move if this tax is brought in. Many of my neighbours are retired. They bought their homes years before me and are unlikely to be able pay this annual tax out of their retirement income. Almost all saved up for their homes rather than relying on inherited wealth. None of us are property tycoons with a buy-to-let empire.

Yes, they, like me have benefited from the tremendous rise in house prices over recent decades and probably they, like me, hope that, when the time comes, selling up will help cover the cost of care home fees. We don’t want to be burdens on our children and indeed, many of us intend to share any profit we might have made with them.

But in our own time. Not when we are driven out by Rachel Reeves, and a Budget that looks likely to tax not only hard-working people, but the very spirit of achievement itself.

Phishing trip that had me hooked

There is no one as gullible as a mother.

Last week, a few hours after my son Sam left for Paris, I got a text. ‘Mum,’ it read, ‘I broke my phone earlier. This is the replacement number I am using now.’

Apparently he’d dropped it in the sink and was worried he’d lose his pictures and contacts.

I texted back an offer to help, not that I had any idea what I could do, and received this message: ‘I’m having another issue I could really do with your help with actually. Only if you can.’

The last sentence sounded just like my son, but when I tried to call, he texted that the microphone was broken, followed by a request to pay an urgent invoice.

Fortunately, just at that moment, I got a WhatsApp from Sam’s usual number to let me know where he was staying in Paris. D’oh!

It will come as little surprise to readers that this was a phishing attempt. Usually I sniff them out, but the fact my son had just gone abroad made it more believable. Except, now I think back, Sam would never start a text with the word ‘Mum’.

Scammers think concerned mums are sitting ducks for their wicked attempts to fleece us. And clearly we are!

A tasty meal – but don’t call it cooking!

Recently some younger members of our extended family gave us supper, but like many of their thirtysomething generation, they don’t do what I consider to be cooking. Rather they assemble dinner from meal kits.

I’ve always been very snobby about meal kits. Receiving your weekly food in little pre-measured packages with a recipe card doesn’t qualify as cooking to me. I’ve always felt you need to put in the time, shopping and chopping, weighing out and fiddling with a recipe, to provide a meal. Anything else doesn’t count.

But credit where due, the pork and fennel pasta they produced for dinner was delicious. Probably better than anything I can create myself and certainly done with a great deal less fuss, mess and with absolutely no leftovers mouldering in the fridge.

But I still don’t call it cooking.

Forsyte looks much better in hindsight

I urge anyone enjoying the current Channel 5 adaptation of The Forsyte Saga to revisit the far better 2002 version now available on Netflix.

With Damian Lewis, perfect as the repressed, tormented Soames Forsyte, and Gina McKee, almost unbelievably beautiful as his first wife, the tragic Irene, it’s ideal autumnal binge viewing.

Why’s it so tough for women in fashion?

Jet Shenkman’s upmarket label Eponine has joined the list of recent British fashion closures that includes Susie Cave’s The Vampire’s Wife and Samantha Cameron’s Cefinn.

It’s striking that these small independent companies are all run by women and it’s a fact that women find it far harder to get long-term business investment than men.

In the fashion space this feels particularly ironic. I’ll stick my neck out and say that women are almost always better designers for each other than men, with a greater understanding of the female body and its requirements.

Perhaps Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos – who is investing in Sydney Sweeney’s new lingerie line – could help out some of our brilliant but struggling womenswear brands, too.