I’m losing my nerve re going public with this blog malarky.

To do so, one of the things I suppose I’ll have to do is post about it on my Facebook page. My page currently boasts 268 so-called ‘friends’, most of whom I would imagine are Faye’s mates from the local pony club, and at the moment it’s listed under my maiden name – Mary Nicholson.

On the one hand, there’s boring close friends and foreigners witless with monosyllabic complacent me me me posts from my comfortable middle-class home, moaning on that I’m too broke to buy a new horse or something, and that none of my on-line dates feel comfortable discussing private schools, hunts, and yacht moorings.

But it’s rather different, putting yourself out there in front of people such as those following Rachaele Hambleton’s occasionally extremely dark posts – where women can’t actually afford to feed their own children; or are living in genuine fear of having their throats cut, or of their children getting stabbed to death by their abusive crazed fathers.  Despite all her selfless campaigning, Rachaele still receives some unpleasant and very negative messages. Yet hers is a completely different scary alien world to the comfortable, privileged, easy, complacent, smug place that I inhabit – what on earth are these sorts of trolls going to say to me? Perhaps they’ll stick a bomb under my car?  Do I really want to get involved, and be completely shafted as a result, by people who aren’t interested in reading jolly, life-enhancing, lightweight drivel about how posh people ‘live the life’, by chippy women who prefer to stick a pin into everything? My skin is not very thick.  This might turn out all to be a very hurtful, self-indulgent, waste of time.