It's my birthday tomorrow. I hadn't envisaged celebrating the occasion at a green burial site, but one has to follow the work. As my editor reassured me, "There's nothing like going to a burial ground on your birthday, it makes you know you're alive."

Since having a green funeral - cardboard coffin and all - is part of my will (wouldn't you know it; I'll be promoting biodegradable packaging right to the end), I don't mind. The setting, a memorial woodland in the Ribble Valley, sounds beautiful. Plus, I'm hoping it will dissuade the husband from pursuing his cut-price compromise when my time comes, which seems to involve our compost bin.

Funerals of a more conventional kind have been on my mind recently. We lost Uncle Peter a fortnight ago and he was cremated on Monday in his home town of Warrington. He was, strictly speaking, a great-uncle (he would sign off the daughter's birthday cards with "From Great "Great" Uncle Peter!") and he used to be a Coronation Street storyliner and scriptwriter back in the 1970s and 1980s.

His name was Peter Tonkinson. He and I shared a professional interest in writing for and about soaps, since I used to pen novelisations of EastEnders. I did four in total and once, when I was struggling with the Bianca (as in Rick-ay!') book, Peter advised me to send her to New York and gave me lots of racy plot suggestions. I couldn't use any of them, but they were great fun.

Granada sent a wreath from the Corrie team, which was touching because Peter's heyday was a long time ago and it's nice that they honoured his contribution to soap history. Apparently, Peter was responsible for the moment in which Bet Lynch drove her car into a lake in Cumbria, a scene Julie Goodyear nearly caught hypothermia from filming. This remains Corrie's most requested episode, and the clip was shown again recently.

He was also responsible for inventing the character of Curly Watts, who was only supposed to be temporary, but ended up staying in the soap for nearly two decades, as well as developing Mike Baldwin's family and back-story.

Peter told this to my fellow columnist Jo Haywood, who interviewed him for a feature in this newspaper. Apparently, the story-lining debates at Granada could last up to eight hours and got very heated. "If there was a storyline you were particularly keen on, you had to shout up."

He also wrote gags for David Frost, Mike and Bernie Winters and Mike Yarwood (including an episode of Three Of A Kind) and did material for Ken Dodd. Ultimately, major success eluded him, but he kept on writing into his sixties, working on pilots and projects, one of which was for a children's character concept called The Veggie Gang.

We have a piece of this legacy in the form of a plush toy called Colin Carrot, which the husband retrieved when he went to help clear Peter's house. He now sits on the daughter's bed and winds up Tarquin Tiger and the teddies as only a giant grinning carrot called Colin can do.

What does success really amount to? Talent is only part of the story. You also need the breaks. And you need to eat. My brother-in-law is an excellent drummer, but he pays the rent by designing websites. My mother-in-law was a stunning catwalk model in the 1950s; maybe she could have been the first Twiggy, but she gave it up to have kids.

I dream of winning the Man Booker Prize for fiction, but my bestseller to date remains Tiffany's Secret Diary. In my case, the talent may not be there but I haven't given up yet. I'm lucky; I've got a supportive partner who pays the bills. Plus, writing a column is a pretty good day job.

Does it matter if you don't end up with your name in lights or an entry in Wikipedia? I don't think so, not if you've been true to yourself and given whatever it is you do your best shot. Fame isn't important; not when it turns ignorant loudmouths like Jade Goody into icons, and notoriety does not equal success, though many people confuse the two.

After Jade's shaming post-eviction interview on Celebrity Big Brother, presenter Davina McCall turned to camera and said, with an absolutely straight face, "And if you'd like to be in the next series of Big Brother" Public humiliation is a perfectly acceptable route to stardom these days. I foresee Jade becoming a UN Goodwill Ambassador in a year or two, having worked up a whole new career wearing sackcloth and ashes.

You've got to ask: what will the epitaph on Jade's headstone read? Me, I'm just having a tree. Not for a long time yet, though. This soap opera we call life is much too riveting.