The rise and rise of Highgate Mums

A television writer once told me she thought that my Twitter feed @highgatemums was misogynistic and bullying in its nature.

She felt it was patriarchal and finger-pointing at what was in effect a very difficult job: being a parent. I tried to defend what I was doing but she had a point. And recently another blogger made a similar point. I cannot abide bullying in any form – is this no different?

The Highgate Mums project had all started from occasional private posts on Facebook. While writing in cafes in Highgate and Archway, I’d overhear snippets of excited conversations between middle-class mums. Funnier ones would be shared on Facebook. Then one day I posted: “The problem…THE PROBLEM with poor people is they don’t realize chorizo are better value than sausage rolls.”

This was a tipping point. Comments from friends (mostly women) insisted that I go public. A Twitter feed @highgatemums (or HM, as we shall call it hereon) was clearly the best format, and so the first post went up. Curious to see how powerful word-of-mouth could be there was no promotion. Pick-up was at first slow and mostly friends. But within months the numbers grew. And at over a year in they suddenly shot up thanks to pick up from a Buzzfeed article.

Happy though I was by the increase in numbers, the TV writer’s original accusation still stood. The feed pointed and laughed. It mocked whilst offering nothing of any substance in return.

But Buzzfeed’s post had an unexpected effect. When HM passed 7k followers (mostly thanks to the article), it was perceived differently. HM followers started to laugh at themselves and their own families. A critical mass had been reached and the expression “Highgate Mums” was being used as an adjective. The concept of HM was suddenly understood not solely as the “other” but also as something within oneself.

Occasionally accusations come in that the posts are made up by me. In a way they are; sadly people do not talk in pithy tweets. So conversations are heard, gists gathered, and distilled into 140 characters. Names and locations are always changed to protect kids’ privacy. But amongst that mangling of content is a piece of honest overheard content. These aren’t cut-and-paste identikit gags about virgin olive oil or organic kale droughts in Waitrose.

There are also responses to posts that are accidentally funnier than anything I could have reported. One example that sticks in my head was: “The safety of children must be paramount above all freedoms and rights”. Responding to this abhorrent nursery-ridden Dystopia someone tweeted, “I don’t see why this is funny. Surely the safety of children is paramount above all other things?” There really is nothing you can say.

HM does not require you to be a woman or a parent, or indeed live in Highgate. It is a state of mind, a laughable awareness of how inappropriately we criticize our own privileged middle-class lifestyles. In this way I do genuinely feel it sets us apart from most of the other overhear accounts, excellent as they are.

The inherent hypocrisy at the heart of HM is me. I am a HM. Okay, I’m not a mum or indeed a parent, but in order to hear the stories of these characters I have to be in their cafes, their restaurants, their pubs. I need to have at least 50% of my psyche agreeing with the things they say.

My charmed life of writing on laptops to endless coffees in cafes is the epitome of a HM. This editorial critical mass of 7k followers meant that we were all laughing at our own hypocrisy. The best posts are by far our retweets from mums and dads reporting themselves or their children.

Now we are breaking 45k followers the Mums are entering a new period. I feel more a curator now than creator as more than half of our content comes from followers. It’s brilliant to see how much we’re willing to laugh at each other, not to mention ourselves.

And this year things have stepped up further: with a television series in development and a book just published I’m having the chance to work with talented creatives to take it in a whole set of exciting new directions. This sounds like spin but it really isn’t. To have people take your simple idea and run with it is wonderful. I’m genuinely pleased with how the book pushed me to laugh at myself and promote people to enjoy HM more for more self-mockery than sneering.

So whilst I still agree with my writer friend, I do hope that the olive-branch of self-mockery helps to even things out a bit.