I’ve let a lot of you into my life.

It is a hard thing to do – when you write a blog like this, you always have in the back of your mind the knowledge that you are giving complete strangers access to the most intimate details of your existence.

But if you don’t share a part of yourself – well, then what are you doing writing a blog?

Do you see the conundrum?

Anyways, it is a difficult line to walk at times.

I mean, my mum reads this thing.

And how many of you are this open with your mum?

Exactly.

But I feel it is time to come clean with what is probably the worst-kept secret in the history of worst-kept secrets.

And it could come back to bite me.
Because it’s pretty personal.

So here goes ... I still believe in fairy tales.

Seriously.

I am a Disney-loving, romance-reading, soppy-song-humming, dance-with-the-bluebirds, Mr Darcy-swooning, card-carrying rainbow chaser.

There, I have said it.

I try and hide it and pretend that I am cynical, but I’m a sucker for a happy ending.

Always have been.

I saw Enchanted the other day and cried.

It was me and the 12-year-olds wiping away the tears of happiness that the princess had found her prince charming.

Actually, it was me, the 12-years-olds and my very own prince charming, who looked ready to stab himself with a glass slipper, but that’s the problem with reality.

It’s just so ... well, real.

And in reality, things don’t come with the fairytale ending guarantee.

Take my fairytale for instance.

Once upon a time, there was a maiden named Amy.

Amy worked all day and all night, scrubbing floors and making coffee for uber moos in the faraway land called hospitality, but as she scrubbed foot tracks off the tiles and steamed milk for lattes, she dreamed of a time when she would be a writer.

But one day, the maiden Amy discovered her new captor in the land of hospitality was a horrible beast who would make her scrub the floors even harder and make even more coffees and didn’t think she was funny or charming at all.

Amy hated the beast and would talk to the other hospitality captives about him, but over time, she suddenly found herself defending the beast and didn’t know why.

She was sure she still despised the beast and thought she must have been caught in some sort of strange spell.

Eventually the beast realised Amy was funny and charming and he became funny and charming in turn.

(Then a bunch of other stuff happened, but it’s kind of boring, so I’ll skip to the juicy part.)

But just as Amy was beginning to think she had misjudged the beast, a fairy godmother appeared and offered her the chance to leave the land of hospitality forever.

It would mean going to a faraway land called radio in the faraway place of Tamworth, but if she worked hard, maybe it would help her on the way to writerville.

So Amy left the beast, who turned out to be a prince in disguise, and tried to forge a new life in radio land.

Amy and the prince-in-disguise didn’t really talk, but she would often wonder what he was doing and if he had found a new maiden to torment.

But then one day, three very long months after she first arrived in radio-land, our maiden, who had just applied a green face mask and oily hair treatment and truly resembled a beast, opened her castle door and found a prince on the other side.

And the prince, who had been set free from being a horrible beast by his love for the maiden, didn’t mind that the fair maiden really wasn’t so fair with oily hair and green pores, and offered to stay forever and ever.

And they lived happily ever after.

Which usually is where the fairytale would leave us.

Except, instead of fairy dust, I got a great big sprinkling of reality and it turns out that happily ever after depends on how you look at things.

Because there are bills to be paid and Prince Charmings don’t always agree that their princesses need sparkly new dresses.

And maidens may have found their prince, but it doesn’t mean they want to give up their dreams of living in writerville, which is hard because it means she has to work a lot to try so get better.

Which means that the prince and princess have to spend a lot of time apart.

And princes may have left their horrible beastly past behind them, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t still have faults and foibles, which sometimes their maidens over-react to.

I mean, Prince Charming may have woken Snow White with a kiss, but did that mean she never really wondered where the hell he was when his step-mum was doing the whole “you must die” thing?

And can you really tell me that Cinderella’s prince never lorded the whole “before I met you, you were scrubbing floors” thing?

And every time Sleeping Beauty’s prince came home late, did she bring up the whole “I still can’t believe it took you 100 years to get to me” thing?

It’s this stuff that keeps me awake at night after Alex and I have been slapped in the face with reality and our happily ever after takes a small knock.

I still believe in fairytales.

But keeping your own fairytale alive in the big bad world of reality takes a little bit more than just believing.

And that is one of the hardest lessons of all.