My phone rings: it is Old-School Boss. I am nervous, but no more than usual. His formal, headmasterly tone always manages to unnerve me, and when I replace the receiver after one of our exchanges I often feel I have slipped back into the skin of the painfully shy and inarticulate schoolgirl I thought I had left far behind.

“Can you come down to my office for five minutes please?”

Something in his voice, coupled with the way in which my boss averts his eyes when I mutter that I have been summoned, alerts me to the fact that something is very wrong.

Old School Boss motions for me to close the door behind me. He doesn’t wait until I am seated to deliver the first line of his speech.

“I’m afraid I have called you here to tell you that I am obliged to terminate your employment with the firm.”

I sit.

My mouth forms a perfect “O” of astonishment.

“This is because of your internet site.”

Somehow he manages to make “internet” sound like an unspeakably filthy word.

He doesn’t care to disclose how it is that the existence of petite anglaise has suddenly come to light, but I suspect the high number of page views I happened to notice last weekend by someone living in my boss’s town were not coincidental. The statistic had made me mildly nervous, but when nothing was said on Monday morning, I dismissed my fears as nothing more than a nasty bout of sitemeter-induced paranoia; an occupational hazard.

I am barely capable of forming sentences, so great is my shock, managing only to stammer: “b…but I hardly ever mentioned work…”

He begs to disagree. “You mentioned work rather a lot in my opinion, and in so doing, you have brought the firm into disrepute.”

With hindsight, I realise this would have been a good time to say “but how can the firm be identified?” However at that precise moment my synapses probably resemble a game of join the dots.

He adds, almost as an afterthought, that he also has reason to believe I had accessed my blog during working hours.

I am handed a letter to read and sign, which invites me to attend a dismissal interview the following week. There is a phrase I do not understand, “mise à pied conservatoire”, the horrible significance of which only becomes clear once I get hold of a dictionary, at home. I have been suspended without pay, pending my dismissal interview for gross misconduct*. The kind of grizzly fate usually reserved for people who endanger the lives of other employees, turn up to work under the influence or embezzle funds.

“I’m going to have to ask you to collect your belongings, and you will then leave immediately.”

I take a few moments to gather my wits. Cheeks flaming, I slowly make my way back upstairs.

Curiously, when I return to my desk to start gathering up my personal effects, my boss is nowhere to be seen.

*This was revised ten days later to “licenciement pour cause réelle et sérieuse - perte de confiance” - (dismissal for real and serious cause - breakdown of trust). Something of a relief as gross misconduct involves immediate dismissal, whereas “cause réelle” involved a paid notice period during which my presence in the office was not deemed necessary.

¶ 10:00 PM

I step into the lift, inspecting my face in the mirror for tell-tale streaks. As I make my way across the park, I wonder whether the nanny will notice that I have arrived from the direction of home, wearing jeans.

I take a few deep breaths as I approach, hoping that my facial expression does not betray my inner turmoil. I very much want to hold things together, for Tadpole’s sake.

Tadpole greets me with indifference, which is not unusual. She is far more engrossed in trying to wrestle a very large Noddy doll off one of her playmates. Her own - a more pocket sized version - lies abandoned on the floor, a grass stain across his cheek.

It would appear to be high time for us to have a mother-daughter conversation about how size isn’t (always) everything.

“Come on sweetie,” I begin, brightly, “you can’t take the big Noddy. It’s not yours. Yours is much better, because he fits in your bag, and you can take him everywhere.”

“NOOOO! I want the big Noddy!” Tadpole rages, face set in a stubborn expression which reminds me, suddenly, of her father.

“Well, that’s a shame,” I continue, with a sudden flash of inspiration, “because it’s little Noddy’s birthday today, and he wanted to invite you to his birthday party… but if you don’t want to come…”

“Can we get a birthday cake?” Tadpole enquires, playing into my hands as I knew she would. “And some candles?”

On the way home we discuss how old Noddy is today (definitely 3) and what kind of cake he would prefer. I realise the boulangerie is closed, and we settle for a chocolate swiss roll from Franprix, the only thing which looks remotely festive.

Once the candles are lit, Tadpole looks at me, suddenly anxious. She points at Noddy’s embroidered smile.

“Noddy can’t blow the candles. Look, he hasn’t got any mouth, mummy,” she says, sounding genuinely sorry for her little doll.

“Well, maybe you can do it?” I venture, trying not to dwell on the parallels between Noddy’s mouth and my self-enforced silence in the days to come. Tadpole obliges, with great enthusiasm.

I look at my daughter, her beautiful chocolate-icing coated cheeks, and wonder how on earth I have managed to make such a mess of things. Here I am, holding a fantasy birthday party, while our whole world is literally crashing down around our ears.

I was “dooced” today.

Suspended without pay, pending a dismissal meeting in ten day’s time.

Asked to collect my belongings together and leave the building immediately.

The words “faute grave” were used. Translated into English: gross misconduct.

Petite Anglaise: the blog that got me fired. Call me naïve, but I really didn’t see that coming.

¶ 8:00 AM

UK

• Article “Wrote blog and got the sack” in The Daily Telegraph newspaper, 18 July 2006. And accompanying blog post from the same journalist, Colin Randall.
• Article “An intimate Internet diary and the sacking of the secretary who calls herself La Petite Anglaise” in Daily Mail, 19 July 2006. Prize for my least favourite paper goes to the Daily Mail for being the people who managed to sniff out my surname, use it against my wishes, send a journalist to my parents house and reproduce sections from my blog after I expressly refused my permission.
• Article “Dear diary: today I lost my job because they don’t like my blog” in The Times, 19 July 2006.
• Article “Sacked: British woman who became Mme Bridget Jones” in The Independent, 18 July 2006.
• Article in Manchester Evening News “Sacked blogger sues her bosses”, 19 July 2006.
• Article in Yorkshire Post “Blog sacking sparks test case” 19 July 2006.
• Article on BBC.co.uk “Sacked blogger sues Paris firm”, 19 July 2006.
• Comment on Guardian Online, Comment is Free “Blogging on the job”, 20 July 2006.
• My own article on Comment is Free, Guardian Online “I was fired for blogging”, 19 July 2006.
• Article on BBC.co.uk “How to blog and keep your job” 20 July 2006.
• Article in Yorkshire Post “Bloggers rally to sacked secretary” 20 July 2006.
• Article in Daily Express (no input from me whatsoever) entitled “The secretary, her uptight boss and the racy internet diary that got her sacked”, 21 July 2006. Racy? Moi? I think not.

France

• Article “Les Blogs d’expatriées amoureuses de Paris” in Le Parisien newspaper, 16 February 2006
• Article “Un blog qui vaut un licenciement” in Infos du Net, 19 July 2006.
• Article on LCI.com “Licencié… pour avoir un blog”, 19 July 2006.

World

• CNN “Bridget Jones blogger fire fury”, 19 July 2006. (This is the PA wire, drawing heavily on the Daily Mail article).
• Same article in New Zealand Herald, 19 July 2006.
• Article in Australian IT “Blogger gets the chop”, July 19 2006.
• Article in De Staandard, Belgium “petite anglaise”, 19 July 2006.
• Article in The Inquirer.net “Bloguette fired for blogging”, 19 July 2006.
• Article “I was dooced” in OhMyNews, Korea, 19 July 2006.
• Article in ZD Net “The First Blogger dooced in France”, 19 July 2006.
• Article in Het Nieuwsblad, Belgium “Ontslagen Franse weblogster klaagt werkgever aan”, 19 July 2006.
• Article in Corriere della Sera, Italy, 20 July 2006.

TV and Radio

• Interview with Victoria Derbyshire on BBC Radio Five Live, 18 July 2006.
• Television (I can’t bear to watch this, very painful) interview on More Four, 18 July 2006.
• Brief radio interview for RTL (choppy editing, in French), see “Brèves” section: 20 July 2006.
• Interview on LCI television channel (French) “Licenciée.. pour avoir un blog” 21 July 2006. (See Multimedia section, first story.)
• Interview on BBC Radio Leeds with Martin Kelner and Julie Langford, 21 July 2006, 5.50pm.
• Interview recorded for Newstalk106 Ireland, to be broadcast 22 July at 09.20 am
• Interview with Europe1 (French) to be broadcast 22 July.

Press Agencies

• AFP wire in English
• AFP wire in French
• AP wire in English 20 July 2006.

Reproduced in:

• in Middle East Times 18 July 2006.
• Yahoo News 18 July 2006.
• Sydney Morning Herald 19 July 2006.
• Today Online Singapore, July 18 2006.
• Le Monde, July 18 2006.
• Radio France Info, 18 July 2006.
• Journal du Net, 18 July 2006.
• Independent OnLine, South Africa, 18 July 2006.
• La Presse, Montréal, Canada, 18 July 2006.
• The Age, Australia, 19 July 2006.
• Pretoria News, 19 July 2006.
• Gulf Times, Quatar, 19 July 2006.

er, frankly I’ve stopped counting these…

¶ 2:03 AM

1. I am a card carrying member of the Famous Five Fan club.
2. My father is a morris dancer. It has taken me 25 years to “come out”.
3. My sisters have ginger hair,
4. I don’t.
5. I attended Doreen’s School of Dancing in Leighton Buzzard.
6. The first record I ever owned was Boney M Night flight to Venus.
7. My skirt was so short when I left the Brownies that I couldn’t wear the belt.
8. I used to send letters to Barney Sumner of New Order. But Peter Hook replied.
9. I mourn the demise of The Face magazine. It told me what to like.
10. I have never ever had a one-night stand that was any good.
11. I am open-minded about non-prescription medication,
12. but wary of alcohol, as I have a tendency to black out and regret the outcome.
13. I laugh out loud on public transport if I remember something funny,
14. but I rarely laugh in front of the TV or at the cinema.
15. My parents wouldn’t let me have a lock on my bedroom door,
16. consequently sex as a teenager was always fully clothed. (Sorry mum, dad, for the TMI overload).
17. I was a 13 yr old Elite narcotics trader and galactic fugitive.
18. I’m often mistaken for a French person these days. Is that a compliment?
19. My Tadpole is Frenglish: loves baked beans, but shrugs and pouts.
20. I was brought up on Rowntrees misshapes. Kit Kats without wafers were a personal favourite.
21. I discovered clubbing in my final year of university; chose Sasha over a first.
22. I’ve worked with so many posh people that I speak RP,
23. but my northern accent makes a lightening comeback when on the phone to my mum.
24. I am often blissfully unaware of world events, but I do read popbitch.
25. I always count on my fingers.
26. I have never owned a sex toy. I fell in love with France aged 11, despite never having tasted a croissant.
27. My favourite parts of my body are my feet and my ears.
28. Nobody wanted me on their team in school sports.
29. I met Mr frog on someone else’s blind date, in the Café Charbon. I met Lover in the Café Charbon too. Hope that place never closes down…
30. My favourite place in the world (so far) is Sicily.
31. I can’t whistle or click my fingers.
32. When asked to describe me, several (supposedly) good friends used the word “demanding”.
33. I’m 33.

¶ 2:10 AM