Blogdom

I've just read through all the new posts in my favourite blogs list and it has set me thinking about so many things.

For a start, there's the fact that it's so easy in blogland to portray a perfect life in a perfect world where even the mishaps are just amusing little asides. We don't generally stop to take a picture when our little ones are bawling their eyes out, let alone post it on our blog. I hope we're all too busy comforting them or trying to work out what has sparked their tantrum. And we don't show the ugly bits surrounding our homes, just the selected picturesque bits.

We all have to do the mundane things like clean the toilet and take the rubbish out, but the only housework we write about tends to be the creative stuff like cooking lovely healthy meals and making wonderful repurposed environmentally friendly furnishings.

Most of us have to occasionally think about such things as insurance, drainpipes, toilets, cleaning the cooker, sorting out our filing and booking a dental check-up. But it takes a certain knack to make that into interesting reading.

I think I'm getting close to there being a point to my ramblings. And I think it's here: If I can work all this out, so can most folks. In which case, the idylls portrayed in people's blogs are not something to measure myself against and find myself falling short. I know they are snapshots of the best bits of people's lives or, alternatively, a cathartic kind of re-shaping and objectifying of the worst bits. In which case, the good bits can still be inspirational and the worst bits can be comradely in an oh-aren't-we-all-in-this-shit-together-at-the-end-of-the-day kind of way.

So, I will continue to edit the bad bits until they are almost amusing and edit my life until it is mostly good bits (this is challenging at the moment in a mundane, house-moving, lots of sources of pointless stress, need-to-get-divorced kind of way). And I will continue to read the good bits, bad bits and daft bits of what you all choose to write about.