• Sarah Milne has posted Part 1 (of 2) of her summation of the event, on her blog “My Journey with William“. Reading Sarah’s story makes me feel guilty for having had such a relatively stress-free life thus far, and I’m proud to say I’ve met her now. Update: Part 2 is now also up.
• Mrs Brown herself posted an excellent story on the Huffington Post – plus, as you’d expect, she’s been tweeting follow-ups all day long.
• Tom Scholes-Fogg of Young Labour has posted a short summary of the event on his blog.
• Sue Atkins of Positive Parents has a very nice blog about the event; Another great tweeter who I met for the first time last night.
• Mr Richard Bacon apparently talked about his time at the event on his brand-new 6Music show today. I wasn’t able to listen as we were out, but I’m going to catch-up with it on the iPlayer tomorrow – so should you!
• Sarah Brown has set up a new Flickr account, where she has posted a number of great shots from the event.
• Musician Kevin Hewick has written a mammoth blog about the evening, though I resent his use of the term “Hooray Henrys” obviously! :D
• The lovely Holly Shaw has a very nice write up of the evening on her blog “Transplants, Tantrums and Tiaras”.
• Sandy Calico has a great run-down of the evening, with some nice photos and some funny stories.
• Hamish Thompson has a good account of the evening, with a very good explanation of the Million Mums cause too.
• Ben Matthews is one of the founders of Twestival, and you can read his blog here.
• The team at MumsRock have a nice round-up of the evening, including a very funny story about label supporters…
• The brilliantly-titled “Notes to self plus two (and the need for red shoes)” has a good post about the party.
• The Confident Ladies have a nice blog covering their day at Downing Street too.
• The lovely @tinypoppet has a great coup with her coverage – she’s actually been to Downing Street twice…
• Grace Fletcher-Hackwood has covered the even on her GAFH blog.
• Last but definitely not least, you can read the official coverage of the party from Downing Street themselves at Number10.gov.uk

Pictures from the event, almost all of which were posted by Sarah Brown herself:

Please do let me know (in the comments) of other pictures/blogs I’ve missed, and I’ll add them in!

The party was entitled the “Downing Tweet Christmas Party” and was held to celebrate / publicise the Million Mums campaign, a campaign by the White Ribbon Alliance, that Mrs Brown is the chairman of. Among the attendees were patrons of various other charities, campaigners, political bloggers, people connected with Million Mums and a smattering of celebrities.

Having been pretty gob-smacked to have been invited in the first place (I assumed the address-request sent by Brown on Twitter was simply going to result in a Christmas card!), I was pretty damn nervous to be heading to Downing Street. A few searches on Twitter originally reassured me that the sort of people going were just others like me – Twitter regulars and all-round normal people. Then, on the morning of the party, I started to notice a few famous people tweeting about it, including Richard Bacon and Channel 4′s Krishnan Guru Murthy. Cue a total brown-trousers moment from me, suddenly glad that I decided to take a tie after all.

10 Downing Street is a pretty spectacular building, and I was amazed at how much of it we were allowed to wander freely around – I stood staring at a painting of Maggie Thatcher for a good few minutes, wondering why she looked so uptight, ha ha! The party took place on the first floor, with the several-hundred attendees allowed to look around and peer through doors and windows quite freely.

Highlights of the evening for me included:

• Singer Beverley Knight doing a live performance of her songs “Shoulda Woulda Coulda” and Gold, standing in front of the drawing room (?) Christmas Tree. She was lovely too, and I even got to chat to her for a bit.
• Introducing myself to Richard Bacon, who I had a nice chat with. He’s certainly a snappy dresser too!
• Wandering up and down the famous stair-case, looking at all the past Prime Minister pictures
• Shaking Gordon Brown’s hand – though I didn’t actually get to say anything to him, as he was being “networked” by a number of good networkers
• Other famous people that were there but I didn’t get to speak much to included Kirstie Allsopp, Peter Serafinowicz, Caitlin Moran, Emma Freud, Rebecca Front and that guy from the X-Factor who spends too much time shaping his beard… I’m thinking Brian? :D

I also had a chat to a few random MPs who I’m ashamed to say I didn’t really recognise – though Alastair Darling’s wife introduced herself to me, and we had a bit of a joke about how annoying it is when the neighbours hold a party!

I didn’t get to take many photos, since cameras and phones are taken off you at the entrance (though very politely!) but there are a few included with this post, and I’m sure there will be some more when the official photographer pictures get posted online.

I’ll shut up about this now, since I know a few people on Twitter are already getting annoyed by my babble. But I should urge you before I sign off to go over to the Million Mums website and register yourself – it only takes 10 seconds, and since we’ve all got mothers of our own I think it’s pretty relevant to everybody!

Oh, one last thing… yes, it was JUST like in Love Actually! :D

I’ve been mulling over the idea of having my own blog for a few years now (how indecisive am I?!) and have finally decided to dip my toe in the water and see how it feels. It’s not a decision I’m taking lightly though. Just like the issue of our over-crowded global population, I’m firmly of the opinion that there are already far too many blogs in the world (200 million plus, last time I heard!) so starting yet another is something I feel a little guilty about. To take the analogy further, there are also also a lot of unloved blogs out there in the world – perhaps I should have considered adopting an unwanted one first? Does it even work like that?!

Either way, I thought I’d at the very least give personal blogging a go – I promise I’ll stop it and delete it if nobody is reading it, how about that? I say “personal blogging” because I’m actually a regular blogger as it is anyway. I blog on our work blog at Tamar, plus I occassionally guest-blog on sites like Media140 and Econsultancy. I also run several different web projects too (details of which I’m sure I’ll share if I keep this going!) and have a very busy job and family life, so this isn’t something I’m going to be able to devote a shed-load of time to. But I promise that I’ll try to only post stuff that other people might find interesting.

One of the reasons I finally took the plunge today was a realisation that, despite blogging in a number of different places, I don’t actually have anywhere (bar Twitter) where I can give my opinion on things non-work related. For instance, I recently had a crappy experience with the LastMinute.com customer “support” team, but short of tweeting about it there was nowhere I could vent. Just the other day on Twitter I asked Google’s Spaminator Matt Cutts how best to deal with an issue I’ve had with a Google Store order (see left). His response reaffirmed the issue that not having my own blog means I have nowhere to air issues like that – so I thought that the simplest way to deal with that was to start one!

But before taking the final step and installing WordPress as I have (and messing around with my first slew of plugins), I jotted down a few of the pro’s and con’s to me doing this, which was what eventually persuaded me. Here’s what I came up with – let me know if I missed any!

• To Blog – As I outlined above, I don’t have anywhere to post non-work related stuff, rants, vents, funnies or just random stuff.
• Not to Blog – Does anyone actually want to read that though?! Probably not for the majority, but the ability to have somewhere to rant about companies and have them actually have a chance of seeing it and taking notice is quite appealing.
• To Blog – I’ve got a reasonably-okay following on Twitter, so surely I can get a few people to read this, with the right incentives?
• Not to Blog – Let’s face it, most of them at Br!tney spam-bots anyway – can spam-bots even read?!
• To Blog – Back when I first started out with websites, I used the site henweb.co.uk as my “hub” – a good place to link to all the different stuff I was doing. I’ve not had that for a long time, and if nothing else it’ll make sure I don’t forget stuff I’m doing, which is something that happens far too often! :D
• Not to Blog – There are already 200 million blogs. Do I really need to make that 200,000,001? Have I even got time to update it or enough crap to say?
• To Blog – OF COURSE I HAVE! Anyone who knows me will attest that I’ve *always* got crap to say…! :D
• Not to Blog – Is blogging just an exercise in online vanity?
• To Blog – A few people have told me I’m an alright wordsmith in the past – including a few writers that I respect a lot. Even if nobody reads this, practise is always good isn’t it?

I’m sure there are other reasons that I’ve missed – why not let me know via the comments? If I’m being honest, I suspect my pro/con exercise was actually doing more to convince me than I’d hoped it would, but I think I’ve decided that I’m going to give this a go…

Henry

P.S. People are always telling me that I don’t do endings very well, so you might want to bear that in mind if you’re going to subscribe…!