HOWZAT

And later, intriguingly: “I hadn’t come to take this decision without any outside help: there was another person involved.”

This “other person” turned out to be a fan, a British man, “Jim”, who lived in Rennes and had fallen for Catherine’s alter ego. He had wooed her through the comments section of her website and when they met at a concert he became the catalyst for her to end it with the father of her child.

Readers laid into her, giving her a first taste of blogger’s remorse. Comments on her message boards ranged from “self-centred” to “adulteress”, to “if he’ll cheat with you he’ll cheat again”. One wrote, “I just feel very sorry for Tadpole and Mr Frog.”

“It’s easy to forget people are reading it,” says Catherine, adding that she was very hurt by the reaction: “You need thick skin.” So why write it at all? “It’s helped me get my life moving again. Like I said, I thought my life was boring.”

As a single mother, however, she gained new fans who responded to her frank blogs in which she relished her new freedom: “I will now have entire child-free weekends at my disposal. Weekends where I can hop on a train, with an overnight bag, and fall into my lover’s waiting arms.”

There was a downside to all the bliss. As her real life became more fulfilling, her blog became less interesting and readers were quick to call her “banal”.

“They’re very demanding,” says Catherine. “I like the British readers because at least they have a sense of humour. The Americans tend to gush, or be rude, or recommend self-help books I should be reading.”

She says the blog picked up when the man from Rennes dumped her last Christmas. How sad to live your life for the amusement of others. “I know,” she laughs, without sounding overly bothered.

In April this year her bosses got wind of the site and she was told to clear her desk and was escorted from the building. Now she is at the mercy of the French legal system and is hoping to sue the firm for up to £54,000 at an employment tribunal.

It would be easy to dismiss Catherine’s drama as an anomaly if a survey by MSN Spaces last week had not shown that there is a blogging epidemic. An astonishing 7m Brits are blogging, equivalent to one in nine of us. While some cover pop culture and politics, most are online diaries.

Sacked and manless, Catherine suddenly seems like a cautionary tale. But who is the villain of the piece? Is it the unforgiving employer, the prurient readers who egged her on, or was it her own compulsion to tell the world intimate details about her existence? “I don’t have any regrets,” she says. “Things are certainly more interesting now.”

But you prostituted your life for the validation of strangers. “That,” she says, sounding worried, “is my number one fear.”

She has one comfort, however. “Yesterday I had 30,000 readers,” she marvels.

A modicum of fame, but at what cost?

FROM THE BLOG

I’d rather my co-workers remained blissfully unaware of the fact that the Frog won’t marry me or that he owns a baa-ing sheep thong.

Mr Frog, of course, is now very aware that his actions have become “subject matter”.

Sadly he doesn’t have time to read this blog very often though. I teased him the other day that I could be having a torrid extramarital affair and writing about it in the public domain and he would still be the last to know . . .

Replied to Jim’s comment with an e-mail today, the first of many in what became rather lengthy exchanges. They were tantalising missives. For my eyes only . . .

Already felt like I had been unfaithful to Mr Frog. I knew that one day we would meet.

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