I’ll just check out my non-existent stats thought I, yesterday, and see if anyone, other than the evil spam bots, has been clicking on my riveting blog.  Usually my blog admin page loads with lightning speed, but yesterday I was taken, after much circling around by that circle loading thingy, to a strange and soulless white page, with the name of my blog at the top against a green strip, and below it the names of several other blogs, with the words ‘charlie’ and ‘mum’ in them, which had absolutely nothing to do with my precious little blog.

My heart skipped a few beats as the awful thought momentarily crossed my mind that my blog had disappeared; had vanished down the internet plughole never to return.  Maybe I’d done something wrong?  Maybe I’d typed something that WordPress.org didn’t agree with.  Maybe I’d been hacked?  Maybe my blog had been stolen away by the blog stealing fairies?

I hollered at the husband (from my seat on the couch because I couldn’t be bothered to get up) to leave his habitual tinkering with rusty electrical bits and pieces, acquired at the tip, and to come into the lounge that instant.  ‘My blog won’t load,’ I whinged, in a tone guaranteed to send him back up the tip.  ‘Let’s look at it,’  he said, in his most irritated IT Manager’s voice, clearly sending the signal that he had to look at enough boring IT issues at work without being landed with them on a weekend.  Upon looking at the white page of doom, it was his considered opinion that my blog wouldn’t load and there was nothing we could do about it.

He said this in the matter of fact tone of someone who didn’t care in the least that my blog had GONE.   I mean I couldn’t believe it!  Doesn’t he know that my blog is the most important thing on the internet, if not in the observable universe?   I was met with the same indifference when I mentioned to son No.3 that his mother’s blog had done a runner.   ‘ Will it come back?’  I pleaded to both of them.  ‘Dunno,’ the son said.  ‘It’s probably a DSN thing,’ the husband offered up knowingly,  ‘I’ll just clear your cache.’   ‘Cache?’  I thought in confusion.  ‘Is there a secret cache of something or other stashed away inside my laptop?’   ‘And what if the husband accidentally clears loads of other important stuff away while he’s at it?’  ‘I don’t think it’s a computer thing though,’ I kept saying, because other things are loading fine.’   ‘It’s just my blog that’s been targeted,’ I said darkly, with a touch of paranoia.

The husband cleared away my secret cache and then disappeared.   But still my blog remained hidden from internet eyes which, to be fair, is usually the case.  In mounting desperation I knelt at the altar of almighty Google.  ‘Help, my blog won’t load,’ I typed in reverentially.  Google spat out a list of vague and unhelpful answers.  Perhaps I hadn’t been properly servant-like.  ‘Beggin’ your pardon Google, but I can’t access my blog’s admin page,’  I then typed, and Google imperiously threw loads of crappy message board answers at me, none of which made the slightest difference.

What if all those mostly unread posts really have disappeared, I thought sadly.  I only saved about half of them in Word, which I use as a back-up for just this sort of calamitous calamity.

So, I moved on to the next phase of blog disappearance panic – I transferred my whinging on to son No.2 and messaged him via Facebook that my blog wouldn’t load and that this was a VERY IMPORTANT ISSUE.  Possibly the most important issue he’d ever have to deal with, in his life, ever.  Son No.2 immediately replied that the blog hosting fee was probably due and once that was paid everything would be fine.   ‘Phew,’ thought I, and then my eyes caught my Facebook newsfeed.  There in black and white was the very recent news that the actor Anton Yelchin had died, at the hideously young age of 27.  The name rang a bell so I looked it up to find that Chekov from the Star Trek re-boot had died.  The husband was back in the room and I told him that that lovely young Russian kid from the new Star Trek movies had died, crushed by his own car.

It turns out there are much, much worse things than the temporary disappearance of one of the internet’s bazillion invisible blogs.