People power never ceases to amaze or inspire me, and none more so than a group of mums.

When human beings feel strongly about something, they’ll quickly band together and make their feelings known.

Many a planning development has been overturned, clubs saved from closure and open space protected thanks to protest.

It doesn’t always work but sometimes, just sometimes, others do listen.

So when a mum breast-feeding her child in a coffee shop was asked to move to the toilet, the outpouring of reaction came as no surprise.

Hundreds of complaints were posted on Facebook after the incident at the Rochester Coffee Company last week and the debate has continued on our website.

The company has since offered a “full and frank apology” to the mother. They said they “have always been a breast-feeding friendly company” and it was a momentary lapse of judgement.

It isn’t all the coffee shop’s fault. From their statement, it sounds as if staff were suggesting mum moved to a quieter spot in a bid to keep everyone happy, but ended up upsetting more than just the few customers who complained.

When and where to breast-feed always seems to raise huge debate when it shouldn’t. It’s natural, it shouldn’t be an issue and if you don’t like it, don’t look.

Most mums are as discreet as they can be – they don’t want people to notice what they’re doing – and those few who do don’t deserve your attention, so don’t give them the satisfaction.

Congratulations should go to manager Stephen Ruffle who as well as apologising has said that, as a goodwill gesture, 50p from every cup of coffee sold this week will be donated to charity. Good news.

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For those of you who were wondering, my brother’s wedding went well.

I didn’t trip up the aisle, I didn’t stand on the bride’s dress, although I did have a mishap with the necklace she was planning to wear when it broke in my hands – I was mortified.

And if anyone has a video of a bridesmaid jumping up and down on the dance floor for several hours, it wasn’t me, honest...

We've had some journalism students in the office over the past few weeks for a spot of experience.

They are an absolute whizz on putting together video and audio and think nothing of sourcing stories from websites, Facebook and Twitter.

Nothing wrong with that, but sometimes the good, old-fashioned method of wearing some shoe leather out on the streets is the only way to get things done.

And that inevitably ends up with the likes of me, and one or two others, harking back to the days when we were trainees.

One of our students couldn’t quite get their head around how we used to get a paper out without modern technology. And, to be honest, by the end of the history lesson, neither could we.

When I first started as a cub reporter, computers weren’t part of a newsroom. Reporters wrote on typewriters, everything double-spaced and in triplicate – top copy for the editor, second copy for the subs and a copy for you.

When computers arrived, the screens were clunky. All you could do was type green letters on a black screen and how it ever appeared in print, with pictures alongside, I never really understood.

By the time I joined the KM Group, computers were part of everyday life, but technology was still a shadow of what it was today.

We worked on the daily paper, Kent Today, and would dash out first thing to a job, phone our copy back from a phone box (when was the last time you called the operator and reversed the charges?) and any borrowed photos had to be driven to our head office in Larkfield and put through the company’s only scanner.

And we were ahead of the rest. Just how did we do it? With grit and determination and the fear of missing a deadline.

On Friday, I stood watching HMS Ocean sailing up the River Thames. We had three reporters on scene – one taking pictures, two shooting video on smartphones, and, within a very short space of time, it was published on our website.

So what’s changed? Just the deadline. The grit and determination is always there. It’s just the deadline that’s moved.

by Alan Watkins

Grab the New Jerusalem (I gather that’s this week’s in-phrase for the World Wide Web). Seize the communications powers..... I did (puff). I have (puff). I will – if only I can keep up with developments.

These days my legs don’t move as quickly as they used to. Did you know we Codgers now blog and tweet? Now in my younger day tweets were certainly an insult, and might have been grounds for selecting weapons at dawn in Gillingham Park.

Having blagged for most of our lives, we are having to get used to calling ourselves bloggers. Back in the early Eighties I was one of the first to have a computer attached to the internet.

It allowed me to send quick letters to customers and clients. It was a strange device, however, big, grey, extremely hot and noisy.

It needed lots of words set inside funny brackets that might have escaped from a British Railways misguided notice board.

Now, as it happens, I have been blogging for a little time, picking up various tales from Gun Wharf and relaying them to the wider world for Medway Messenger’s on-line readers.

Incidentally, I thought playing on line was dangerous: my old gramp told me you should never play on railways, then took me to a loco shed to look at the brutes on which he worked. I also Google (but the doctor says it is all right providing I keep it under control).

In the past few years new words have appeared, and old ones have been corrupted (something that apparently happens occasionally to hard drives).

There are things I draw the line at undertaking. I refuse to socially network on something called Facebook (whatever it is).  I even have a tag (which, for Mr Cook’s benefit, we used to call a handle).

I have a digital camera. It has a piece of plastic the size of an undernourished thumbnail. Somehow it holds 16,000 pictures, and thanks to an army of pixies (I think that’s what they call themselves) can be uploaded to a computer in a matter of nanoseconds.

You can let loose a Paintshop professional who lives inside your computer. He can turn them green, add faces, words and nu merous other things to distort your original image.You can write a document using a similar number of fonts in different sizes.

As for vocabulary, heaven help my 20-month-old granddaughter. She already knows how to choose TV channels, call grandma on her parents’ mobile phones (another device that deserves kicking into touch) and change the music on the multiplayer at home.

What will she have to confront when she is a Codger herself? It is time for Codgerdom to demand: Bring back the quill!

At least David Cameron should be delighted at the savings that will achieve for the British economy.

FACEBOOK: The Movie. I think that’s a better title for The Social Network - a hard-hitting comedy/drama/true-life/thriller about the ins and outs of inventing a website. Or maybe, “Friends: The man who had only one“. Or in contrast maybe: “Friends: the man whose got 500 million”.

Anyway, Jesse Eisenberg (whose mum worked as a clown apparently) plays Mark Zuckerberg, a dorky Harvard student who loves sandals and brilliantly comes up with the same idea as MySpace but calls it Facebook (intriguingly it was once referred to as The Facebook, but Justin Timberlake didn‘t like it so Mark dropped the The).

Two and a bit hours later it is revealed he’s made billions of dollars while screwing over his one friend, and hero of the horror/fantasy film,  Eduardo. I think the film revels in the irony of this. I know I did.

Other characters in the western/action-adventure include some angry rowers called Cameron Winklevoss and Tyler Winklevoss (both played by Armie Hammer) who try to sue Mark because Facebook was their idea.

Then there’s another bloke called Eduardo Saverin (played by Andrew Garfield) who sues him because he stumped up the cash for Facebook but then got booted out and had his shares slashes by the malevolent villain of the film, Justin Timberlake.

Justin Timberlake doesn’t try to sue him but he does have some cocaine on his hands at one point, leading to a tense phone call with Mark in which everything works out alright in the end.

Harrowing over-the-table-suing scenes are intermingled with lots of half-naked girls screwing around like you do when you got to Harvard, while upbeat music gives an Ocean 11 feel when Mark comes up with a new idea like “the wall” or “Farmville”.

They even write complex html and php coding on glass to really draw the viewer into the excitement of internet coding/programming and drink alcohol to show how social social-networking can be.

The final scene sees Mark hitting refresh on his browser (having agreed to hand over a few million to Eduardo from his billion dollar empire) waiting for his ex-girlfriend to accept him as a friend on Facebook.

He’d previously called her a bitch and accused her of having small breasts, so whether she accepted him or not remains a mystery, but does leave the door open for a sequel.

I think it may have been a love story all along.

An interesting week so far - many meetings and full council meeting last night which is always quite interesting in itself. One debate in particular got me thinking  - probably because it has some resonance with other things going on in my life....thoughts on how tight we hold onto something we believe is right, how difficult it is to be truly open minded about something, and how to cut away seemingly relevant arguments to find the truth of a situation.....but there are more thoughts to explore before I can be coherent about this.

On a totally different theme, I had noted earlier in the week that two of my facebook friends had fallen out big time. Watching how the conversation strings followed a predictable downwards pattern was quite entertaining - to a point where one of the unfortunate duos friends said something about the other person which (to my mind) was totally out of order.

This is what happened. Friend X had told friend Y something about their friend Z - in confidence......friend Y thought that this information should not have been shared and then proceeded to tell their friend Z what had been said. Friend X was of course very unhappy at this broken confidence - and proceeded to share information about friend Y which had been told in confidence....ok don't even try to make sense of it.

But the long and the short of it was that both X & Y felt very angry and betrayed - both blamed the other. Most of their shared friends had wisely kept out of the dialogue - but their own friends polarised violently.

I have seen and experienced this before - it is quite normal when couples split up - friends and family members take sides. Each gang of supporters believing their guy has been wronged and was innocent. When as is more often the case - it is just a big mixed bag of: anger, self righteousness, misunderstandings, mistakes, emotions, innocence - and often including a smattering of selfishness and stubborness to name but a few human frailties.

Of course this all happened in full view of the facebook public - both of these people are very popular people and number their friends in the 100's - and although it may have been mildly amusing to begin with it was clear that both people were upset, hurt and angry. So finally two of thier mutual facebook friend elders said 'Enough'. And things calmed down.

So here are some simple facebook rules which are based on self respect, respect for others and safety:

• Keep real arguments private
• don't announce you are away on your hols
• don't 'stalk' your adult kids via facebook
• don't make snide remarks or slag off mates or ex mates

Some times it feels as if I am juggling a hundred things...not only the normal household things such as housework, shopping and gardening - and if I am being honest I am pretty bad at all of that leaving my partner to do more than his fair share. But also in terms of what I should be doing next, what is the next priority on my time.. is it getting more NLP/Hyp clients, building up use of the alternative health centre which I also run...or fulfilling my Councillor casework which includes pages and pages of reading in preparation to attending the Development Control committee where we hear planning applications for all sorts of development projects and the Corporate Scrutiny committee where we scrutinise decisions to be made by Cabinet. Sometimes I am out at meetings every night of the week until 10pm or later - leaving little time to follow regular sessions of relaxing Tai Chi or some of the other wonderful activities that happen in Sandgate and Folkestone.

The postman must know which of the people on his round are Councillors because the amount of paperwork which drops onto the door mat is phenomenal. Yes we can, and often do, get it on email too - but email doesn't come with a guarantee of delivery especially if reports contain hundreds of pages which they sometimes do - and of course some Councillors are not always on email so good old fashioned postal is used for fairness.

And the juggling doesn't stop there...being a school governor and trustee of a couple of concerns means that my waking hours are a constant challenge to keep abreast of all things. And it goes without saying (although I will say it anyway) that I always have a pile of NLP/Hypnosis books or articles I want to dive into - all of these things do not leave much time for socialising with friends unfortunately.

So - let me start this paragraph but thanking technology for Facebook - 'oh no' I hear you cry - 'how sad that this poor deluded woman thinks Facebook is comparable with a social life!!' I am not a great TV watcher, I get bored too quickly with soaps and repeats so instead I spend time between reading and researching on-line to keep an eye on Facebook which is proving incredibly useful in helping me to keep up with my Folkestone friends and also the younger members of my family. My nephew and my son (both in their early 30's) do not live close by (one just outside Croydon and one in London) and with their family and social commitments I wouldn't be able to see them perhaps sometimes for a month or so. Using Facebook and by adding my little, sometimes quite random, comments on their conversation threads I can keep track of what is going on in their lives and they with mine. I have enjoyed finding a bizarre sense of humour in my Nephew that I wasn't aware of and I can keep myself updated on the crazy hours and activities my son gets up to as a graphic artist (or as he was credited on one film a 'paleo-anatomist) - and they in turn can marvel at the seeming eccentricity of their older relative (my son still cannot get his head round my apparent interest in steampunk).

So - juggling is what I do, I am not sure I can claim to do it really well - I just do my best and if you spot me in the walking down the street you may perhaps forgive me for looking a little spaced out...I am probably trying to remember what my next appointment is and wondering if I have the right paperwork with me. It is almost 6pm now - I had an early evening meeting but there are no more meetings tonight so I will rush home for dinner and more on-line researching for an advert I am running...and a chance to catch up with friends and family on Facebook too I hope.