I started blogging just over a year ago. I was bored and lonely and had just attended yet another surreal happening — it might have been the arrival of 13 riotous Icelandic youths in fake beards, brandishing strings of sausages and rifling through handbags in a municipal art gallery —and didn’t have anyone to tell about it.

I had been living in Brussels for two years with my French boyfriend and two French-speaking children, doing a rather serious job among serious people. I didn’t regret moving at all, but I missed the easy humour you can share at the absurdities of daily life with close friends who share your cultural references and language. I started the most basic blog imaginable and wrote a first post about getting a filling from my brutally blunt Flemish dentist.

Initially my posts focused on the idiosyncrasies of Belgian life: the peculiar selection of music in the Metro, Flemish words, why Belgian hippies wear turbans, how to dress for Brueghel-themed drinks. A small but regular group of commenters, almost all women, drifted across from other blogs and stayed, often sparking up conversations between themselves. I started to blog daily.

Over time I started to touch on more personal things: my inept parenting and the horrific state of the house, the dislocation of living in a place I liked but desperately missing London. I gradually began to talk about the awful comedy of group therapy, my mother’s death, bulimia, my two abortions. The comments I received were thoughtful and supportive, often sharing comparable experiences of their own.

In January, building on this sense of the blog as a shared experience, I created a monthly ‘Confessional’ feature where readers could confess their transgressions, which has become very popular. The content varies from farcical to, occasionally, terribly sad, and contributors reveal themselves to be as wry, messy and confused as I am.

Of course this kind of validation is addictive. I have been known to drive miles on holiday to get my fix, guiltily, at the nearest internet cafe. The house is filthier than ever. This summer, my boyfriend became so exasperated at my all-consuming blogging, he started his own blog entitled Blogging Is Bad for You. (We are currently separating.) I have made a handful of good friends. Many more I have never met but they are terribly real for me. When they disappear, as some do, I find myself wondering about them. Has Tragic Anon stayed engaged to the man she doesn’t love? Did the woman with the unfaithful rock-star husband get her cost-price bespoke kitchen from his mistress? How is Red Shoes’s IVF treatment going?

www.belgianwaffling.blogspot.com