It's all happening in the blogosphere. I've barely begun this personal, lighthearted online diary, and now my services have been snapped up by (fanfare please) The Argus, our local newspaper here in Brighton and the surrounding locales of Sussex.
Well, specifically their website. Invitations to pen the occasional article for the actual paper have yet to flood my inbox, but let's not allow that to dampen any ambitions that may happen to be bubbling beneath the surface.
So, now I have two blogs to write on a regular basis. The Argus blog, entitled 'Devine Inspiration' (yes, I know, I've always hated puns on Devine and divine, but it works, so I'm rolling with it), is to be a (mainly local) news agenda reactive blog, in which I shall pluck from the esteemed publication and/or its website whatever reports trigger thoughts, and proceed to analyse them with all the incisive skill I can muster. Or, if all else fails, fall back on 'And finally...' style stories such as the skateboarding dog who hogged most of page three earlier this week, complete with shameful 'Bony Hawk' pun.
The irony of this hit me this morning, when, reading through the web editor's guidance notes which make the simplest processes seem like The Italian Job but with added complications, I remembered how, a few months ago, I and two friends were plagued by the most bizarre of accusations.
Neither I nor they were believed to actually exist in the physical world at all.
Now this would certainly be news to many people. My parents would surely be bemused, as would my husband and the rather suave vicar who presided over our wedding ceremony. Yet for weeks the three of us were subjected to a barrage of abuse and accusatory vitriol demanding to know why we were all masquerading as real people.
Spot the blatant flaw in the argument: according to one person in particular, all three of us were using Facebook and Twitter from behind fake profiles. All of us. Which left nobody to be the 'real' person behind them.
Eventually, one by one, we deleted and deactivated, and set up entirely new profiles in which we were far more careful about whose friend requests and suchlike we accepted. Since then, all has been well, and it is no coincidence that my new Twitter profile bears the wry-smile tag of 'ReallyLulu'.
It does rather bring a whole new meaning to the term ghost writer. Allegedy our little trio was a figment of our collective imagination, and we were no more rooted in actuality than the mind-bending universes of The Matrix or Inception. Although were the ludicrous barbs true I might claim that we were better acted.
The most laughable twist is that these daft denouncements arose because - in the bitter words of our accuser - we were 'commenting on each other's posts all the time.' Well, er, isn't that what social networking is all about?
Happily, as two midwives and a health visitor can now also attest, we three are very much alive and walking this earth rather than reinventing Marley's Ghost or mischievously floating around like Casper.
Which in many ways is a shame, because it would be lovely to be able to indulge the ongoing custard craving in the certain knowledge that it would not affect my diet because I simply didn't have one. Or to look forward to the latter stages of pregnancy with the comforting surety that however much our baby kicked from its womb without a view, I wouldn't feel a thing.
As it is, just for the record, the gas and air can very definitely be on standby come the early spring of 2011. And if, as seems inevitable, I scream whilst delivering our firstborn, those wails will be coming from the maternity ward, and not from somewhere far away in the ether...
Well, specifically their website. Invitations to pen the occasional article for the actual paper have yet to flood my inbox, but let's not allow that to dampen any ambitions that may happen to be bubbling beneath the surface.
So, now I have two blogs to write on a regular basis. The Argus blog, entitled 'Devine Inspiration' (yes, I know, I've always hated puns on Devine and divine, but it works, so I'm rolling with it), is to be a (mainly local) news agenda reactive blog, in which I shall pluck from the esteemed publication and/or its website whatever reports trigger thoughts, and proceed to analyse them with all the incisive skill I can muster. Or, if all else fails, fall back on 'And finally...' style stories such as the skateboarding dog who hogged most of page three earlier this week, complete with shameful 'Bony Hawk' pun.
The irony of this hit me this morning, when, reading through the web editor's guidance notes which make the simplest processes seem like The Italian Job but with added complications, I remembered how, a few months ago, I and two friends were plagued by the most bizarre of accusations.
Neither I nor they were believed to actually exist in the physical world at all.
Now this would certainly be news to many people. My parents would surely be bemused, as would my husband and the rather suave vicar who presided over our wedding ceremony. Yet for weeks the three of us were subjected to a barrage of abuse and accusatory vitriol demanding to know why we were all masquerading as real people.
Spot the blatant flaw in the argument: according to one person in particular, all three of us were using Facebook and Twitter from behind fake profiles. All of us. Which left nobody to be the 'real' person behind them.
Eventually, one by one, we deleted and deactivated, and set up entirely new profiles in which we were far more careful about whose friend requests and suchlike we accepted. Since then, all has been well, and it is no coincidence that my new Twitter profile bears the wry-smile tag of 'ReallyLulu'.
It does rather bring a whole new meaning to the term ghost writer. Allegedy our little trio was a figment of our collective imagination, and we were no more rooted in actuality than the mind-bending universes of The Matrix or Inception. Although were the ludicrous barbs true I might claim that we were better acted.
The most laughable twist is that these daft denouncements arose because - in the bitter words of our accuser - we were 'commenting on each other's posts all the time.' Well, er, isn't that what social networking is all about?
Happily, as two midwives and a health visitor can now also attest, we three are very much alive and walking this earth rather than reinventing Marley's Ghost or mischievously floating around like Casper.
Which in many ways is a shame, because it would be lovely to be able to indulge the ongoing custard craving in the certain knowledge that it would not affect my diet because I simply didn't have one. Or to look forward to the latter stages of pregnancy with the comforting surety that however much our baby kicked from its womb without a view, I wouldn't feel a thing.
As it is, just for the record, the gas and air can very definitely be on standby come the early spring of 2011. And if, as seems inevitable, I scream whilst delivering our firstborn, those wails will be coming from the maternity ward, and not from somewhere far away in the ether...
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