Oh dear! Becky at mybluehouse, elle n'a décidé pas plus. Where will I turn to now if I need advice on how to create fashionable hat warmers for my boiled eggs or plot the latest fashionista crazes from halter-necks are back in, to the bum crack is the new cleavage?

OK I would snooze through some of her posts when the focus of her attention was on her latest knitting projects and wacky food and sewing creations. But her astute social observations, good natured rudeness about the French and her ability to be straight talking, clever, sassy and mumsy (momsy), all at once - (how did she pull that one off?) made her required reading. As a blog it looked to me like it had been the product of a giant blender with meg, Martha Stewart and House and Home chucked in as ingredients, whiz-whipped then seasoned with the diced pages of a couple of French and Spanish language food dictionaries.

And a great link finder - a real candidate for the: "where do you find these things?" school of respect. It's no wonder her hoards of admirers got into a right old tizzy when, following a little semantic confusion after her hasta luego valedictory, almost beat the doors of her comments down with a despairer's repertoire of "boo hoos", "why why whys" and Frenchy expressions of cri de cours, quel dommages and je suis tristes . The howling crowd had balm smeared on their wounds only after an early Becky encore of Schwarzenegger-ian I'll be back promises. To ease their pain. It eased mine as well.