Now my daughter has just got up and berated me for being loud and silly at the party I was hosting for my brothers birthday, my sister in laws birthday and my sons end of school party. She rolled her eyes and said “all you did when I was trying to take some photos was grab the nearest person and squish them to you so they couldn’t breathe – everyone looked completely mangled”. Oh. Well, seems to me that’s a good way of always looking better than everyone else. She’s right though. I’ve just looked at the photos. Ridiculous. Lots of mangled faces with me hanging off them.

In amongst snail hunts and hair disasters I was trying to read the paper. There is an article about “Parents and their drinking”. According to a new survey, children who see their parents drunk are twice as likely to binge on alcohol themselves. Really? That’s a blow. I was trying really hard to put them off.

We all had a great night though. I hired a room in a pub on the river. Just lovely. I pretended it was my house and felt hugely grand (even in a pub). We had a lovely mix of friends and family. GREAT in fact. I don’t care now that I’ve got a headache, it was so completely worth it to see my 18 year old son dancing with my teeny weeny mother to our family anthem (“Pata Pata”). My father, I hope was somewhere in the vicinity enjoying every minute and being proud of us all for finding lots of excuses for getting together and having fun.

It really did put my little blog into a greater perspective and it was interesting to read that in her opinion the rise of the “mummy blogger is as epoch-defining as anything that Marilyn French or Betty Freidan every came up with”. Perhaps she’s right and it’s the new modern “sisterhood – or a disparate, chaotic, joke-loving version of it”.

I agree wholeheartedly with everything she wrote. About how the online world has provided a voice to the ordinary woman. About “where there was isolation, there is kinship and solidarity, where there was bleakness there is humour, where there was need, there is help offereed, where there was sadness, there is support”.

Without doubt, my blog has helped me get through my ongoing trauma of divorce. When I started, my blog was a sad little voice in the wilderness. In a tentative and terrified gesture I threw it out there and echoes slowly began to resonate back to me. It took a while, but eventually I found that the blogosphere provided an enormous safety net for me. A place in which I felt able to vent my anger and peel back the layers of my grief without being judged. In the two and a half years I have been blogging I have had one nasty comment and several irrelevant comments – other than that I have had nothing but well considered advice and support. I have made many new friends. I have been to Disneyworld with six other fantastic bloggers. I WILL get to meet my African blog mates one day. It has played a very big part in allowing me to find my sense of self again. As India points out I have felt “supported, befriended and not alone”. For anybody thinking about starting one – just do it. It is not about being able to write. It is about the response you get with the comments. It is about being part of a new modern community.

I too have had my moments with my children. From time to time they think I’m a loser with imaginary friends and when I talked about meeting some blog mates they were horrified. They thought I was going to be kidnapped by a fat pervy old bloke in a bedsit and disappear forever. But isn’t that the point? We as parents are fearful of the web for our children because we don’t understand it. We are worried about their Facebook friends and comments. About who they talk to. But why should it be any different from blogging? Why shouldn’t we embrace the global possiblities our little lives have to offer? As India says “blogging presents very 21st century opportunities for new friendships, both real and online”. My African cyber connections have already allowed me to meet and have dinner with a Doctor when I was in Lusaka (which has resulted in the fact that I am now helping get football kit out to Zambia for several teams) and the safari in the Luangwa Valley I went on with my father this summer was chosen because of my blog friends.

I have made many friends abroad as a result of my blog and I believe there are huge possibilities to do extraordinary things through cyberspace. Sometime soon we will do more than write articles about products and places – the PR companies recognise that collectively we are a force to be reckoned with – we might have little voices, but we can make a bloody big noise if you put us together. According to the marketing world, we are the ones who can make things happen. The ones who book the holidays, buy the products, make the decisions.

Imagine all that power collectively? Imagine organsing whole schools of our children to swap places for a week? Imagine our own area twinned with an African city? Imagine us organsing our friends and family to go and mend walls, dig holes, educate children, teach sewing, reading, dancing, heart surgery and imagine what people in other countries could come and teach us?

We could actually Make A Difference.

I for one am very excited about the possibilities.

I have texted him every day since his operation and he’s always called me straight afterwards. Today he hasn’t. Which means that he’s still feeling awful. Which worries me hugely.

I’m really worried about my mother too. She doesn’t cope very well without him. They’ve been married for 45 years and have seldom been apart. Seeing her trying to be strong is breaking my heart. She’s due to have an operation in a month because she can barely walk – she needs a second, 8 hours of surgery to restructure her spine from both the front and the back.

This is the downside of having somebody you love by your side for nearly the whole of your life. Of having found a soulmate to share your life with.

She barely knows how to breathe without him.

My father was in town this week. He had his notorious “boys lunch”. The one that usually results in an injury. Last time he broke his shoulder and he is going to have to have it operated on some time soon. Thankfully this time it was agreed that he stay the night with one of his mates and they made sure he got home safely. Just as an example of how they work so well together he had found a painting in a gallery that he really liked. “I can’t buy it until I’ve shown it to your mother, so they’ve lent it to me for a couple of weeks”. I had a conversation with him later in the day and he was delighted because my mother loved it and he’d put it up already, above his desk.

Later, I spoke to my mother “your father has bought this hideous picture, but don’t tell him I said that, he loves it and that’s all that matters”.

How lovely is that? No wonder my marriage didn’t work. Firstly, my husband would definitely have bought it without consulting me and secondly I would definitely have told him I hated it and that he couldn’t put it up (except maybe in the downstairs loo). It’s all about caring about each other’s feelings.