Internet Safety Day

Am feeling very post-modern, Facebooking, Sky News-ing & Tweeting about internet safety. The adolescent brain has poor impulse control and reasoning function. So, what's our excuse...?

I'm blogging and you're reading me, yet we aren't meeting face-to-face. We think we know the score, that we can evaluate this relationship, that we're not street-wise but rather net-wise.

But it's as well to remember that there can be no substitute for human interaction. I've just taken a break from writing today to have a carrot & ginger juice (she had spinach juice, I am such a wimp...) with a new-ish friend who is full of energy and positivity. I felt the warmth of the real sun on my face - not the over-cooked heat of it streaming directly through my garret windows - and smelled the delicious cooking smells in the cafe. And now I have a final burst of creativity before the day is out which I put down to leaving the computor alone for a while and going out and having a life for half an hour.

Internet safety isn't just about filters and childproof locks and being aware of how split-second decisions to text that boy who fancies you in Year 11 can lurk forever on the world wide web. It's about having the courage to pull out the drip once in a while and really live.

A hall of mirrors

Have been amused today to discover that my review last week in the Sunday Telegraph of Susan Hill's exquisite new novella, A Kind Man http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/8257832/A-Kind-Man-by-Susan-Hill-review.html has itself been 'reviewed', in a way, in the New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/cultural-capital/2011/01/susan-hill-mansel-grant . The NS column is actually a summary of the fiction reviews in any given week, but the end result, especially for those of us mentioned, has a distinctly 'hall of mirrors' feel, fracturing the light, reflecting back a reflection. What if someone were now to critique the NS column, alongside, say, The Guardian and The Week, which run similar 'review of reviews' columns? Where would it all end? Reviews stretching to infinity.

Licking the spoon...

So, were you allowed to lick the spoon when your Mum was making cakes? In other words, did you grow up in a pre-lapsarian, pre-Edwina Curry, salmonella-free era, when scraping out the last of the cake mixture was a treat on a par with Christmas? Yep, me too. It combined the buzz of acquiring BETWEEN MEALS an additional ration of chocolate (all my mother’s cakes were chocolate), with the hint that by scraping out the bowl I was somehow contributing to the cake making effort. And that this made me a cook.

Now, being a proper grown up and all, I now know that cooking is a little bit more complicated than that. But deep down I have never lost the love of creating food from scratch, wafting around a kitchen filled with savoury aromas or the warm fug of baking. From the age of six when my mother graciously declared that my pastry was better than hers, I've chopped and whisked and rolled and sauted and enjoyed the simple pleasures of making good food. And over time I’ve found that cooking taps into magical things unrelated to the kitchen. As well as providing actual nourishment, cooking can be soothing, therapeutic, and good for the soul.

I'm not sure what I'll be blogging about, but then that's one of the big challenges of life: facing the unknown. The main ingredient will, I'm sure, be cooking. Except when it's about eating out, which is another passion. There’ll be a dollop of politics, a soupcon of social commentary, all basted in the juices of my job as a psychotherapist. And as I’m the agony aunt of Psychologies magazine, the glaze may well come from mulling over how this thing called Life makes us feel. I may not blog terribly consistently - I'm meant to be finishing my second novel, about Jax, daughter of a famous TV chef, who refuses to learn to cook - but then again, life is too short not to have a go at this multi-tasking malarky once in a while.

So join me here – not only to lick the spoon of life, but eat the cake too!

Now, where’s my apron…?