When I started my PBASE diary back on 8th March 2003, I wanted to write an honest reflection of what it’s like to be me. I thought about how to go about it and decided that if I don’t write my real views then I couldn’t call it a diary and if I did, I stood the chance of offending or upsetting someone.

It’s a fine balance between telling the truth and being cruel I suppose. There are many acerbic observations that I might make in the pub, with a drink in my hand, into the ears of a friend that I wouldn’t write here in these cyberpages. On the whole I think I’ve got my balance about right albeit there was one occasion late last year when I upset my sister by something I wrote. It wasn’t intentional or aimed at malice, I just got the balance wrong and it sparked a fight.

I’ve dabbled in diaries a number of times over the years. These two volumes of early diaries have given myself and Shazbop much amusement recently. They appeared, abandoned, in the middle of a room in the house after my ex-husband had moved out. There was a scene of complete devastation….no furniture or ‘stuff’ in the room, except for these two forlorn volumes in the middle of the floor. I pounced on them and gleefully reminded myself of the contents some twenty years after they’d been written. They were my ‘gig diaries’ and were the written word to go with the photos I took at the time. The page is open at a 1981 U2 gig, the privilege of which was brought to me for the princely sum of £3.50 (about $6!!!). My gig analysis wasn’t all that brilliant really but you can see a young me trying to get out! Shazbop and I have pored over them on many an occasion since, howling with laughter at the things I wrote. I took a week off work last year with the intention of turning the diaries along with the photos into a book to see if I could get it published. I failed when I realised how boring scanning negatives and cleaning off scratches etc is. I worked like a Trojan for a day…..then the sun came out and I spent the rest of my week’s holiday in the garden. The best laid plans….

Anyway, I never realised how much pleasure I’d have got from this diary. I have met (both in the literal and in the cyber senses) many wonderful people and I get a real kick when people drop me pmails or messages telling me they love reading my daily postings.

I’m often surprised by comments from people I know. I’ve now got a few regular readers from my time in Princeton in March. A friend of David’s emailed him yesterday offering us ‘pond equipment’ because he’d read about the pond in my Saturday’s post. I had no idea he read it. Other people will stop me in the corridor at work to make an observation.

It did occur to me that I expose myself to all sorts of potentially strange things as the result of being so frank online and I’m sure I don’t need to tell you today that a curve-ball from my past spooked me badly last week. It’s made me a bit worried….what if the ‘one who tried to kill me’ sees it? If I’m googled by someone benign then I could be googled by someone with a grudge or ill-intent. Still, I did promise myself that this was ‘for real’ and I wouldn’t flinch from saying what I want.

Often people say they want to know more….Pete said as much a couple of weeks ago about a post. Sometimes the public nature of this diary prevents me from saying stuff that I might have written in a private diary. The reasons for this are many. Sometimes it’s because of time – it takes long enough to do each day as it is. Sometimes it’s because I want to save a bit that’s just for me. Sometimes I don’t want to hurt the people I love. In the case where Pete asked for more, I couldn’t bring myself to say more about something that happened a whole lifetime ago and doesn’t matter anymore because I might have hurt or unsettled David, the real love of my life. I am always conscious of his very private nature being splashed about all over PBASE as it is.

My parents love reading it and it’s their last port of call of the evening when they go up to bed they stop off in my Dad’s study to have a look at ‘today’s entry’. My Mum remarked that she’d no idea her daughter could be so profound and that she loved seeing this different side of me.

I’m full of enthusiasm for stuff at the moment and I rang my Mum to see if she’d caught up with my diary since their return from holiday to find her in floods of tears on the phone. I was trying to find out if she'd liked the photo of me wearing her earrings. I actually caught her and Dad in the process of reading the last few days from their trip. When I asked what was wrong she blurted out through the tears that she felt as though she hardly knew me at all after reading my postings while they were away. She had no idea of my heartbreak or of my long struggle back to a living, breathing, (relatively) normal human being after the pain of my young adulthood. She felt as though she’d let me down, firstly because I couldn’t tell her about it and secondly because she didn’t spot it and therefore couldn’t help me. Funnily enough, she could never have helped me, only I could do that.

It’s shocked and upset me that something that I have loved doing has revealed this pain for my Mum. I hope she sees now that it’s all a long time ago and there is no use crying over it. She did say that it’s really obvious that I’m happy now and that makes her happy but I hate being the person who made her sad and made her cry.