And the Cabinet Office has published a report which shows family background has slightly less impact on GCSE results for those born in 1990 than those born in 1970.

Hooray, we officially say. But are we really cheering?

There is nothing like having a baby for the hidden snob within to come out of the cupboard and pole-dance shamelessly around the post-natal classes.

When I eventually managed to prise my lids apart, having dabbed at them with a warm flannel for quite a while, I was horrified by what I saw.

There was no need for a Halloween mask for me. Staring back at me in the mirror was someone I barely recognised.

My sockets had swollen up like tennis balls and the eyes themselves had been reduced to red slits with pus oozing out of them. I had Conjunctivitis.

The strange thing was that I felt well in myself yet I figured I could not go into work because I was too ugly for human consumption.

In my late teens and early 20s, I loved to go and gawp at women bending over paddy fields in China, children begging for biros in Egypt, men in Palestine offering us wooden carvings of scenes from the Bible.

I never saw it as gawping of course.

Having bought a digital camera in January, I have had been trudging through life with a residual feeling of anxiety as bit by bit more and more traces of my two-year-old's "firsts" have been hanging in a black plastic case from a strap in our hallway.

I don't like it because I just don't get it. It is, apparently, the end of global capitalism as we know it. (Is this such a bad thing?) It is, we are told, a financial black hole into which all our mortgages, pensions and savings will be sucked.

It is cataclysmic. It will affect us all. And yet I can't even get to first base in understanding it.

I understand mortgages, or at least I thought I did. That was before I knew there were people who packaged them up and sold the debt on to somebody else.

I have been feeling tetchy about this during the past few weeks as, in common with 295 of the journalists employed by Trinity Mirror in the Midlands, we have had to decide whether to apply for new jobs within the company or volunteer to be made redundant.

For me that choice has been about whether to apply to become an all-singing, all-dancing multi-media journalist in Birmingham or fly off to Barbados - son under one arm, husband linked in another - and build a house.

I also figured she was indulging in hyperbole a tad when she said she had been beaten and locked in room with no food for days simply for getting her hair cut.

I regret greatly that I was putting inverted commas around her speech as I listened, but it was so far from my experience it seemed incredible.

That was many years ago. Now, I know enough about the lives of so many British women whose parents were born in villages in the Asian subcontinent to appreciate that death threats from brothers when the women leave their marriages is far from unusual.

What interests me is the reasons for this brutality - the dynamics underpinning a culture which makes such savagery acceptable within itself.

I remember getting hot in the school classroom when the teacher stormed in and demanded to know who had thrown the wastepaper basket out of the window.

I blushed because someone else was telling a lie. It wasn't even me.

Fibbing is not one of my talents.

That's why I'm perplexed by those who have a looser relationship with the truth than me.

I'm not talking about the Anne Darwins of this world. I'm talking about a friend who has made out she is five years younger than she really is on Facebook, the guy who says he'll meet me at 7pm while being fully aware he can't get there till 7.30pm, the shop manager who says he'll call when my order comes in, even though he knows he never does.

The puzzling thing for me is that the kind of people I'm talking about are not criminals. I'm talking about friends, good friends - kind, decent people.

I know there are crooks who want something for nothing and for whom lying is a way of life.

It's the good people who break promises and tell porkies that interest me. These are people who think of themselves as honest - and they are - and yet they don't think of it as lying when they say something they know isn't true.

Is there something wrong with them - or with me? Am I too pedantic? Do I use language too literally? Is it because I'm a writer that I expect there to be an accurate relationship between someone's words and what's actually the case?

I'd really like to know. If you're honest enough to admit you're not always honest, or that you don't even see it like that, do tell me how it is for you.

I feel both a pang of sadness as I leave him and a whoop of delight as I realise I am free to have an uninterrupted cuppa with a fellow mum.

I relish the quietness of the house as I sit and type and I miss the sounds of chaos erupting in every room.

I look forward to him growing into a fine young man as I sigh wistfully that he is no longer a baby boy.

Who'd be a mother eh? There's no pleasing some people.

The slump in my mood came when I read Max Mosley had won the landmark High Court legal battle with the News of the World over revelations about his private life.

I was delighted by the outcome. How could it possibly be in the public interest to reveal the Formula One chief takes part in sadomascohistic role play - even if Max is the son of the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley? Had the News of the World won, I would have been really fed-up.

I'm also pleased to discover that on the back of the Max Mosley story the BBC website has a backgrounder on sadomasochistic sex, including comments by those who are into it, which will hopefully puncture many a popular misconception about spankings, role-play and all the rest.

This is fantastic.

Every so often I put it on, look in the mirror and ponder...my legs haven't really changed since the days I wore this, so why would I not wear it again?

I'm not entirely sure of the answer, but I find the word "dignity" wafting around somewhere in my brain.

I was reminded of this when I signed up to Facebook on getting back from holiday recently.

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.

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.

"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."