So what am I doing here anyway?

Well, not here on the planet obviously, that had something to do with a near New Years eve-ish dalliance between my mother and her ex husband sometime over 30 years ago and is pretty irrelevant to any readers I may end up garnering (on the topic of which - hi mum).

No - the question would be "Why am I blogging?" And the answer isn't one that I've really got to the bottom of yet.

Some of it has to do with being on the 'bleeding edge' of advertising (ahem), where we've finally noticed this whole User Generated Content thing. How wondrous we think (about 3 years later) we can get consumers to do our client's work for us - it's like Member Get Member but cheaper. And so we put together some proposals (powerpoint of course), throw in a bit of 'blah blah yaddah yaddah' and if we're feeling particularly edgy we may even chuck together some diagrams with triangles and arrows and - hey presto - here's one we prepared earlier. And then client surprises all of us and goes 'Great - we'll have some of that. Can you sell some mortgages out of it?' and we suddenly realise that our knowledge wasn't as great as we thought it was and that we'd better get our acts in gear and fully understand what this thing is. So, first step - start a blog.

Then there's the friends - the ones who seem to have created fascinatingly interesting, brightly witty blogs reminiscent of reading a set of Dorothy Parker quotes all pulled together under the most intense of un-put-able-down crime thriller plotlines. The blogs that you compulsively check every day for updates, and that would make you envious of their lives - if you didn't know about the stuff that doesn't quite make it in. The bits where they bore you until 3am with irrelevancies relating to their latest conquest (Shall I text? What does this text from him mean? etc) or when they whinge about work politics while you're busy trying to focus on drinking yourself into oblivion after a significant dressing down over some write-offs. And you start to think.. maybe I could look that interesting, maybe I could become a shining and incisive online wit - a resource for amusing anecdotes and one liners. Of course reality strikes soon afterwards and you spend whole minutes trying to make your profile as unassuming as possible (yeah - take a look) in the full knowledge that if you actually keep this going - it's not going to be all that interesting.

And then lastly, the cost and pain of therapy. I was recently in a relationship that ended (yes yes - ok - I was royally dumped) with a guy who spent our meagre four months extolling the virtue of therapy and the fact that he had now 'sorted his head out about what he needed from a relationship'. Now - other than the fact that I now know it obviously wasn't me, this got me pondering at the time. Was my thirty-something singledom up until this point a factor of being incapable at relationships? Should I go running to an extortionately expensive therapist who would probably tell me what I already know (yes - my problems with relationships do, to some extent, stem from my interaction, or lack thereof, with my father) in order that I make a better go of this one?

I got as far as Googling "therapy" and "London". After a significant intake of breath at the results (we're obviously a dysfunctional lot) I narrowed it down to "therapy in SW17". It seems there's a whole host of different specialists in different approaches and they'd all be happy to talk to me about my problems with intimacy. But you know what? That whole problem with intimacy means that I'm just not that comfortable being intimate. Especially not when I’m paying through the nose for it.

So, to drag myself back to the point in hand, perhaps the answer is to be intimate without intimacy – perhaps the ‘blog’ is the answer. And blogs are ‘conversations’ between ‘users’ (no – not the syringe toting type) that set up a ‘dialogue’; or at least that’s what the 3 year out of date copy of Revolution I picked up said and I’m going to choose to believe it.

Perhaps, I think, a bit of cathartic soul baring combined with a few pithy comments telling me to get a hold of myself (probably from my mother) and I’ll stop whining and be cured of all my relationship blindspots - married with 3 kids and half a Labrador, living in the country with no worries about that whole mediocre career thing I used to have, while I drown in nappies and shag the tennis coach. A surprisingly attractive picture now I come to think about it - though perhaps a yoga teacher would be a better bet, my tennis never was up to much.

Anyway, take your pick of the whys. Meanwhile I have to go and explain to my clients why trying to write a blog as though you were a ‘genuine’ consumer while extolling the virtues of their product line in every post won’t be a winner.

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