Recently by Jo Ind

It has taken having a baby for me to realise that I am writer. I'm not saying I'm a good one. I'm certainly not a rich one. I am a writer because I'm desperate to write.

Apart from journalism, I have not been able to get my fingers to the keyboard since Arch was born two years ago. I have been totally fulfilled in some ways but parched in another way - parched of words.

Next week will be different. I am on holiday - and I'm not going anywhere other than my study. Arch will be off doing things with his dad and I will be alone. The computer screen will be my sea, the keyboard the sand, the mouse my sangria.

I'll blog again when I get back in the week starting 7 July. I will be drunk on words, bronzed by my thoughts, sharing my snaps of the country from which I've returned.

Last month a dear friend of mine had to spend the whole night sitting on a public toilet.

Why?

Because she was using the loo in a community centre and the caretaker, not realising there was anybody left in the building, accidentally locked her in and went home for the night.

My friend had no option but to sit it out until the community centre opened for business the next day.

That would have been a horrible experience for anyone, but particularly for my friend as she is frail and recently bereaved.

Of course if she had had a mobile this would never have happened, but she is in her 70s and she did not have one.

I mention this because I am astonished to think that anyone could think the digitial divide is a myth.

Yesterday when Arch wanted a biscuit I told him to wait.

"Yes, you can have a biscuit, but just let me finish pouring the boiling water from this kettle." He tugged my sleeve and hollered while I was doing this, but I figured that as he was now two-years-old, he could handle the ten second wait.

Being a mother of a toddler is all about delivering the message: "I will meet your needs, but sometimes I can't meet them straightaway."

It was different when he was a baby. When he was a few hours, a few days, a few weeks old, the message was: "Here I am."

I don't like watching people snog. Pecking on the cheek is fine. Kissing on the lips is OK too. When people start putting their tongues into each other's mouths I feel the need to divert my eyes and then wonder why I should have to.

This week I went swimming at a private fitness club and was more than a little irritated at having to divert my eyes for 45 minutes while a couple snogged between cavorts in the water and the rest of us had to dodge them as we breast-stroked and crawled up and down.

When I tried to make a complaint to the duty manager, I was astonished to discover that the club has no policy on snogging and therefore no action was taken.

"Can you believe it?" I said to my colleagues when I got into work the next day. "Do people really find snogging in a fitness club acceptable?"

I was in full-blown outraged-of-Birmingham mode when one of my peers said: "Isn't it a bit like the argument about breast-feeding in public?"

"Aren't there enough words out there already?" asks one of my non-blogging friends. "Who has the time to read these things anyway?" How I understand that feeling, though as is obvious, I am blogging on despite it.
I am neither someone with a natural affinity to world wide web (I sit in wide-eyed wonderment at the likes of fellow bloggers Jon Bounds or Joanna Geary) nor am I a cypersceptic. I am someone who feels overwhelmed by it.
I would love to meander for hours through this reality which we call "virtual" (yet is as real as what we might call "tactile reality") but I all too easily feel overwhelmed, as though cyberspace is an infinite arena that I have to somehow get a grip on - when life is already tricky enough simply with shopping, cooking, interviewing, writing and working out how to get my son's his nappies dry without the central heating on.
That's why I was very excited to be invited to a conference in Seattle next month entitled No Time to Think: an inquiry into information, technology and quality of life.
It's hosted by David Levy, who is professor at Washington University's School of Information and is about how to deal with the information overload and extreme busyness that result from the new technologies.
For reasons not entirely unrelated to extreme busyness and breast-feeding, I'm unable to go, but I'm very excited to think that even those at the forefront of information and technology are having to deal with the same issues that I am, namely how to use the world wide web to improve our quality of life rather than stress us out.
I am sure it's possible for the internet to be a tool in making life simpler rather than more complicated - but working out how takes effort, time and skill and can't be done from the sidelines. And so I blog on....

Before I had a child I assumed the challenges of being a working mum could pretty much be resolved through good childcare.
If you had enough money, I figured, you could pay for someone you trusted to look after your baby while you worked, had your legs waxed, or did whatever was needed to keep heart and home together.
What I hadn't accounted for was the ferocity of that tug that defies rationality and yanks you to your kin leaving a trail of scattered papers, ringing phones and unfinished work in its wake.
Take yesterday as an example. It was a day I would normally have been at home with Arch, my not-yet-two-year-year-old, but it so happened that I needed to be at a conference.
I arranged for him to be with a friend, whom he knows well and who has a little boy of a similar age that he plays with often - my godson.
They were to go to the Sealife Centre in the morning, have a picnic lunch and go to the park in the afternoon. Sorted.
The hitch in the plans was that the day before Arch had been unaccountably sad. He was still sad yesterday, so when I left him with our friends it was with the niggling doubt that what he really needed was his mum.
I went to the conference.

One night more than a decade ago, I was drinking tea and nibbling biscuits with two nuns in the house in Balsall Heath, Birmingham that they used as a base for getting to know the women who worked as prostitutes is the area.
"What was I doing there?" I've asked myself and I really can not remember, which is strange because I remember other things about the evening very well indeed.
What I remember is a young woman, who was working that night, coming into the house. She was lovely - bright, pretty, funny and endearingly childlike.
"I'm not being funny or anything but my boyfriend says you're nuns so you're not going to know about men are you?" she asked the sisters, very sweetly.

How would you feel about men in white coats scrutinising an image of your almost-naked body laid out on graph paper?

I had assumed most people, especially women, would feel a little exposed if they had to step into a scanner which created a 3D image of their body without any clothes on.

That was an experience I had recently, all in the name of journalistic research, which you can read about in today's Birmingham Post.

I was doing it because I was writing about the body volume index which is being created by a Birmingham research company . Once that research is complete, it could replace the body mass index as a way of assessing if a person is overweight or obese.

It's been almost two weeks since my last posting - sorry about that - but I've been ill.
And being ill when you've got a not-yet-two-year-old in the house is, I've discovered, an art in itself.
There was l lying motionless in the back room when my husband slipped me a cup of tea. "Arch doesn't know you're here," he whispered.
I knew that my chances of resting would be blown as soon as the ever-perceptive toddler heard an untoward noise, so I hid, listening out for the best opportunity to sneak to the loo.
Being sick with a child, proved to be about balancing the difficulty of keeping cover against the stress of being kissed and jumped on and pulled,
By the afternoon, I decided I just about had enough strength to sing Wind the Bobbin Up and allowed myself to be discovered.
I've no doubt my recuperation was hindered as a result, but what can you do? Any tips on being poorly when you've got a little one will be gratefully received.
Meanwhile I see it is a condition worthy of psychological study. A paper has been written "Drawing on social construction theory, we explore the meaning of being an ill parent, highlighting the tension of being a parent and patient."
That's some consolation. But I just want to know how to sleep with one eye open.

I have no desire to wish away Arch's infant years, but sometimes I find myself thinking wistfully of the days when I could curl up on the sofa and read a book.
Whenever I attempt this at the moment, Arch, who is not yet two, snatches the book from my hands and pretends to read it himself before tearing it up.
That's why my heart sank when I saw a new book called Toddling to Ten: Your Common Parenting Problems Solved had been published.
Compiled by Hollie Smith, it offers advice ranging from matters like "living with loss" (how to help a child cope with bereavement) to "job done" (how to get your kids to do the things they don't want to do.)
"Very useful," I thought, "especially the stuff on eating and sleeping and sharing, but when am I going to find time to read it?"