Emin is moving on

"That was the last time I cried. People on Any Questions and Question Time were laughing about it. I didn't mind when the Standard made another tent, it was as if they were trying to help, but when one of the tabloids got someone to make it again, saying, 'Here we are Tracey, we did it for £67.50', I was upset.

"I lived with that tent for six months; I sewed every little piece. I slept in it. I can't make it again. When I heard the beach hut had been destroyed [The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me Here] I was like, my cosy little hut! I can't replace them.

"I lost a painting as well. But the reaction to the fire was like when the Nazis burned all the books. The fact that people laughed will go down in history; Britain invaded Iraq and when their art was destroyed everyone thought it was funny. Do you know what?" she says, suddenly cheering up. "The woman who sewed the tent for the paper actually wrote to me and apologised."

A few days later, she bumped into Dinos Chapman in a Jacuzzi. "He had said that he and Jake wouldn't mind recreating their art that was lost, because they had enjoyed making it, and he was worried that I would be offended. I said of course I wasn't. It was just that I couldn't possibly go back to the place I was in when I made the tent."

The surprising thing is that Tracey Emin genuinely cares what people think of
her. Take what happened after she refused to allow Ecclesbourne Primary School in Islington to sell the patchwork quilt she had made in collaboration with the children.

"I'd be walking down the street and people would shout out after me, 'Oi, you selfish cow, let them sell it, or give them the money!' I made a mistake by not talking to the press about it straight away, but talking to my solicitor instead. The school said they wanted to sell it because they couldn't afford to frame it, but my blankets hang in the Tate from a piece of wood, they don't bother to frame them."

She says it's a shame, but she won't be working with children again. She can't. The quilt is now stuffed in a plastic bag in the school cupboard.

Emin works 18-hour days and has just finished an exhibition at Sketch; she is preparing for a London show, and has a book of short stories due out in the autumn.

She takes me over to the quilts lined up on the floor; she says the waiting list is so long she can't make them fast enough. (I'm pleased to see she hasn't changed that much. Although the quilts are made with sweet scraps of floral fabric she buys in Turkey - "When they see it's me, they suddenly put the price up" - the words, stitched in felt, are still very rude.)

Her income has doubled every year since 1997. The money means she is able, say, to change a flight to Australia because she got up late after a hangover; she recently bought another studio, beautiful, like a church, round the corner - "Just because I could."

"I've got it all, haven't I?" she says, getting up to march around. "I do this to Brian Sewell," and she sticks her middle finger in the air. The Evening Standard's art critic once described her as an " ignorant, talentless, loutish a nd now very rich...F-wording harridan".

"My exhibitions get 1,000 people a day. And," she says, dashing down the stairs and coming back with a dinky little handbag, " my art is affordable."

The bag is a patchwork of f loral fabric, but this time the felt lettering is more along the lines of: "You said you loved me." She was commissioned by the Long-champ label to design a range of luggage; coming up with the concept took a year because she found it hard doing something so small and practical.

She is annoyed that someone at Vogue said she had sold out. "No one will make any money from these," she says. "You're getting a piece of my art, with a bag thrown in."

The publicity shots were taken by her friend Mary McCartney, who "wouldn't have done the photos if my bag had used too much leather". The names of her famous mates crop up in conversation all the time - Val (Kilmer); Dinos ( Chapman); Kate ( Moss); Julie (Burchill) - but one of her closest friends is still someone she has known since they went to primary school together in Margate.

She is most in tune, though, with her little tomcat, Docket. When she goes away, she says he wees in her suitcase as a protest. When he went missing for a week, her mum came up from Margate to help look for him. They were walking the narrow streets of Spitalfields, chatting, and he heard their voices and started yowling.

"He was trapped in a derelict house, so I broke in and we carried him home. When we got to my house, there was a group on the Jack the Ripper tour walking past, and when they saw I'd found him they all stood and clapped."

She is close to her mum, who although putting her on the pill, and letting her leave school aged 13 ("I still went back for PE, geography and art") also wouldn't allow her daughter to take domestic science classes because "she didn't want me to be a slave".

Her Turkish-Cypriot father, who only lived with them three days a week because of the other family he kept stashed away in London, is still in her life, although they had a really big row two weeks ago.

She has just finished making a semi-autobiographical film about growing up in Margate; she is hoping to be able to show it at the Venice Film Festival, and release it at Christmas. She wrote the screenplay "just so the BBC would give me the money", but then threw it away and made it up as she went along.

I ask her if it taught her anything about her childhood (she has said in the past that she was abused). "It taught me a lot about how hard it is to make a film," she says wryly.

"I'm a different person now. I can be on my own. I'm learning to drive, Ronnie [Wood] is teaching me to play the guitar, which I love because I can hug it. I've learned how to email so when I get home late at night I've got people I can talk to. And I know now that, if I want to, I can have a baby," she says. "I might have just turned 41, but I'm fitter than I've ever been."

Two of the names she embroidered into her tent were of the babies she aborted in her twenties. I ask her what she thought when she saw the picture of the foetus on the front page of the Evening Standard; how you can see it is a little person even at a few weeks old.

"I've always believed it's a baby from the moment it's conceived," she says. "But I wasn't fit to be a mother. I still believe it's the decision of the woman alone. When I had my abortion the doctor refused to sign it, so I said, you either sign it, or I'm going to do it myself."

I ask her why she doesn't adopt. "They wouldn't let me," she says, "not with my track record. If I lived in America maybe I could just buy one."

She smiles. "Tomorrow, I'm flying to Rome, to see my Roman," she says. "He looks like a centurion." Have you slept with him yet, I ask, and for the first time, Tracey Emin actually goes red. "Not yet," she says. "And before you ask, I'm not going to tell you anything about him." So there we have it. She blushes. She gets excited about a mini break. Who'd have thought.

Tracey Emin suitcases cost about £3,400; handbags from £150, available at Longchamp from September (020 7493 5515)