IT IS the end of an era for the Stelfox family, because this is my last Saturday column.

After 11 years, 550 pages and something like 500,000 words, I’m putting the final full stop in place.

No longer will I poke gentle fun at the Man-in-Charge, milk the comings and goings of the Offspring for material, or expose the shortcomings of our cats.  Not in print, anyway.

It’s been a journey that has taken me through the child rearing years  – Firstborn was newly at secondary school and Secondborn was just eight years old when I wrote my first column – and into the era of the empty nest.

I’ve gone from being a mother myself to becoming a carer for my own mother. 

A lot can change in a decade.

When I began this column I thought of it as a diary of family life.  The Man-in-Charge, my husband Martin,  often commented that it offered vignettes of what we’d been up to that week and it was a snapshot of 21st century living.

Appearing in these weekly snapshots my son Alexander and daughter Julia gained a certain minor celebrity status among their friends.

They provided me with much of the material for the early columns – from family arguments over the dreaded Monopoly (still a favourite of Secondborn and still a cause of familial stress)  to birthday parties that turned out to be a re-enactment of Lord Of The Flies.

Later on it was more about trips to Ikea for stocking up on student essentials and wrangling over mobile phones.  They didn’t always like what I wrote and demanded censorship rights.

When the Offspring were having a particularly quiet week and failed to provide inspiration then The Man-in-Charge usually stepped up to the plate with his over-active, over-achieving personality.  He was always good for a few lines on subjects such as Bonfire Night pyromania or his addiction to sledging.  (Someone once asked me if he really was the man in charge and I said “yes”.  How could he be otherwise when I can barely keep up with him?)

And if all else failed there was our menagerie – at one time as many as five cats and a rabbit.  They were good for a few more column inches.

Occasionally I have tackled serious issues.  I was once asked to appear on daytime television to defend an article I wrote suggesting that offering sterilisation to drug addicts was perhaps not a bad idea (I was tempted but declined, as I couldn’t spare the time to go to London). 

And I’ve put my head above the parapet on everything from hypocritical vegetarians (I was once one) and the twaddle that is homoeopathy to paedophile priests and the now-controversial Liverpool Care Pathway for dying people.
I have had hate mail as well as some wonderful letters of encouragement.  The former is as important as the latter because there is nothing a columnist likes better than a response from readers.  Otherwise, how do we know we’re hitting the right spot or anyone is actually reading the fruits of our labours?

But strangely enough it is the quirkier  columns that seem to have attracted the biggest response – like the time I wrote about my neighbour’s penchant for killing squirrels.  I got more mail on that issue alone than any other in the previous six months.  And there was the column on a call-out to the man from Dynarod, which I thought was ‘plumbing’ the depths for inspiration, but turned out to be a talking point with everyone I subseqently met.

This column has charted my life during good times and bad, through the pain of bereavement and illness, as well as the joy of watching my children grow to adulthood.  In a way it’s helped me through the difficult bits – therapists say it’s healthy to write down one’s thoughts and feelings and I’ve certainly done that.

Years ago a fellow columnist told me that I would begin to dread the weekly deadline, particularly if I hadn’t thought of anything to write about.  She was right to a certain extent because there were times when I despaired and inspiration was sadly lacking.  But there has never been a blank page – and I hope I haven’t disappointed.