Mumsnet Blogfest triumph!

The Mumsnet Blogfest is a triumph, both for Mumsnet and for Eliza Gray™ ®! Everyone tells me so. Well, at least four people. They think I performed brilliantly on my Keynote (yes, Keynote!) Panel discussion about Private Lives on a Public Stage, and how much you should reveal online. One woman even says, 'You were a heavyweight on the panel.'

Yes! Eliza Gray, Heavyweight™ ®!

Plus, three people tweeted my bon mots. 'If you can't hack it, don't blog it,' they quoted, picking the one opinion I voiced that was actually lifted from Prof Tanya Byron's earlier session. Though, of course, it's all in the paraphrasing.

Let me rewind. I arrive, wearing my fabulous as-new H&M-by-way-of-Oxfam wrap dress, to a cacophany of coffee-supping ladies who all seem to know each other. I loiter and lurk, and then pluck up courage to ascend to the Green Room on the 29th floor. Given that this is my first and possibly last
 bona fide Green Room experience, I must grasp it by the horns, sweep in and rub shoulders with the great women of our time!

Except the Green Room is empty. All the great women of our time are downstairs. I descend once more into the cacophany, pick up my copy of The Times and an Innocent smoothie, and take my seat in the audience. 

The opening speech is delivered by Miriam González Durántez. I am an instant fan. I Like her! I Google+ her! She is real and warm and passionate about motherhood and womanhood and children and human rights. And totally gorgeous (and, as it happens, softer-looking than at the Royal Wedding). Miriam for PM! She and Michelle should rule the world! Brilliant minds, compassionate hearts.

             

Miriam is followed by five more brave and brainy women, Gaby Wood, Rachel Cusk, Zoe Strimpel, Zoe Williams and Jenny Lawson, The Blogess, who joins us at 4am Texas time via Google+ Hangout (I know! What's that when it's at home? Well it's like Skype - and it means she can bring her cat). The conversation strays onto my panel's patch, the question of how much of yourself and your intimate circle you lay bare on your blog. Rachel, who is very highbrow, says her mission is to 'challenge the social contract' (I know!) and 'when one writes with candour one is more lacerated.' Zoe W, who is very funny, says, 'I will genuinely do anything for anybody.' 

Of the foul comments left on her blog by trolls, Jenny says, if they say 'your an idiot' and spell 'you're' wrong, she leaves that because it's quite funny, but if they leave a really vindictive comment, she goes in and changes it to one of soft, fluffy adulation. She really is a marvellous role model! Not that I've ever had any vindictive comments, mainly because I don't have any comments. But all that is changing now I am a Heavyweight (and about to diss Liz Jones), and it's good to be prepared. 

Via further sessions with more razor-sharp brains and tongues, and bountiful platters of delicious nosh, and a lot of whizzing up and down in the lift, the witching hour arrives. I go up to the Green Room to meet my fellow panellists. Liz Jones is sitting on a bar stool right in front of me, looking vacantly in my direction. I smile and walk towards her. 

'Hi Liz, I'm Eliza, we're ...'  My voice fades away, as she is still looking vacantly at me, and yet apparently not registering my existence. She reminds me of Michael Jackson, with her highly made-up face of questionable authenticity and the impression that she is operating at one remove from reality. One of the Mumsnet team comes up, all smiles, and re-introduces us. Again, Liz blanks me, this time turning back to her mobile.

I strike up a conversation instead with Tim Dowling of the Guardian, fellow panellist of the humorous rather than laid-bare kind (and banjo player with the marvellous Police Dog Hogan, who, he says, have not been invited back to the Port Eliot Festival where Cass and I saw them a couple of summers ago. It's a scandal!). 

Soon we're whizzing down the 29 floors. I follow Liz down the final steps to the theatre, curious as to whether she'll make it on her six inch bondage stilettos. We take our places on stage. Fi is ill. Instead we have Observer writer Geraldine Bedell, in orange, who directs her first question to Liz. 'You've been baring all for longest here...'

There's a pause. Then Liz says, 'I can't hear you.'

It seems Liz is deaf, which could explain everything. I have since Googled her and she has written that, being profoundly deaf, 'People think you are either stupid or rude.' While I am totally sympathetic to her having a hearing impairment, I put this in the balance as an excuse for her behaviour and find that she still comes out rude, given that it can't have escaped her that there was some sort of comradely introduction going on earlier, and that a smile of acknowledgment is the usual minimum social requirement. 

'Do you ever regret anything you've written?' asks Geraldine.

'Yeah. All of it,' says Liz. 

The audience sits up, riveted. The Twittersphere crackles with messages of pity for Liz. I crane my neck to see past Geraldine. Liz's face bears a pall of gloom.

'When you discover your husband's cheating,' she's saying, her mask still uncracked, 'there's a big bit of your brain that says, that's great, I've got a two-parter. It makes you a slightly heartless, nastier person, almost as if you don't feel things any more.'

What with Liz and Zoe, who is busy explaining terms like 'bully wank', I know I won't be getting a look in. Eliza Gray, The Invisible Woman™ ®. 

We wind up with a question from the audience to Liz: 'Is it worth it?'

'No,' she says, 'it's definitely not worth it.'

'So why do you do it?' asks Geraldine.

'Well, it's a job, isn't it? If I could turn the clock back to a time before writing about myself, when I was editing, I would. But, if you take the money for doing a column, you have to literally spill your guts. I've had to move house. I came downstairs the other day and this woman was in my hallway. I wouldn't do it again, absolutely not.'

'Well, on that note...' says Geraldine a little defeatedly, looking left, to the gritty/earthy side of life, and right, to the fluffy, unfeather-ruffling side. Something bubbles up inside me. No, I think, that isn't it. 

'You say that you have to spill your guts,' I blurt, 'but that's something you've constructed for yourself. I don't think you have to spill your guts to entertain, you have to have a good ear and eye for funny or touching things. You don't have to put all the horrible stuff in.' Hmmm. Not very profound. But a strike in favour of protecting and preserving one's close relationships.

And with that, we repair to the 2nd or 28th or is it the 29th floor for a Prosecco reception? For the first, and probably last, time at such an occasion, I am not invisible! People come up to me! They want to hear my views and advice! It really could go to one's head. Along with the Prosecco.

But, out in the cold dark streets, while we revellers are knocking back the fizz, Liz is scurrying - inasmuch as one can scurry in six inch bondage stilettos - back to her laptop, where she pens a poisoned missive aimed at every Mumsnet blogger.

As I tuck up in bed with my iPad to explore the tweeting sorority, up pops a link to Liz's piece on the Mail Online. I admire her speed, but my decision not to write about her is overturned in an instant. The gloves are off, Miss Jones.

Quite apart from the fact that she mentions Zoe and Tim but not me (back to invisibility!), she seems not to have registered that the Mumsnet Blogfest was awash with intellectual working women and feminists. Who just happen to be mothers.

'The most revolutionary tool we have,' writes Liz, 'namely, free speech on the internet – has been turned into a giant WI meeting, with women being PAID to sit at home, ignore the child about to toddle into the glass wall that makes kitchen and garden seamlessly as one, and to write about being mothers...

'I wonder, too, what their husbands think of them and their rantings. I imagine it makes them feel like proper men, with little women who instead of tapping away at the glass ceiling swap recipes and tips for getting a child off to sleep.'

I wonder whether Liz is not just profoundly deaf, but profoundly blind?