AGED nine, or thereabouts, Ma Stewart took me along to a pantomime in the local town hall where they offered a free choc ice to any child at the show with their family.

The lady in charge of the fridge denied me my complimentary ice cream on the basis that two "did not make a family". It's amazing how control of chocolate flavoured lollies can send power straight to the head.

I've been reading a lot recently about The Family. About how feminism corroded it, how Labour dented it, how David Cameron holds unrealistic notions of it, how gay marriage will be the final nail in The Family's coffin. Blame for summer's English riots was nudged towards the feet of single-parent families and absent fathers.

Here's the first problem with talking about The Family. It's just that: The Family. Singular. But there's nothing singular about modern family and it's time we developed a more profound acceptance of that.

Consultation into gay marriage closed yesterday and, while churches of various stripes are dead set against it, it's an exciting time to revisit what constitutes family and what is needed by members of any family group, no matter how alternative or traditional. "Pro-marriage" groups, such as Scotland for Marriage, align themselves with pro-family groups, which really are pro a nuclear family ideal to the exclusion of all others, as if there's not plenty of marriage and family to go round.

In truth, and it's nearly too obvious to write, The Family is safe from gay marriage. It's too late, the damage is done and not by any single thing but by a range of complex social and economic factors, from worklife to the sexual revolution and the mass abandonment of religious belief.

My friend had a short-lived affair with a married man. "You could have ruined a family!" shouted another horrified friend. Yes, that's true. But he ruined her. She hadn't known about the wife and cried for weeks. There is a nasty arrogance attached to this notion of the mainstream family that sets it as a sacred ideal above all else. The assumption of the cocooning, inoculative protection of a nuclear family has become horribly romanticised. Yet so too has the worth of the single mother. She is hailed as noble and sacrificing, completing gruelling work with grace. Both are true, both are false. It's not quite the done thing to admit that a simple suggestion such as two happy parents, raising their children together is an ideal situation; it's somehow more PC to resist the observation. Possibly because to do so is to acknowledge that the living situation of millions of others is inferior. And yet there's no guarantee that traditional family means stable or healthy family. Sometimes single parenthood is best. Sometimes – gasp – two loving fathers or two loving mothers are better than one of each living in quiet loathing.

The only immutable fact is that family is for life, no matter how mainstream, no matter how unorthodox. The debate surrounding gay marriage is not just a debate about what constitutes commitment but what creates a family, an institution worthy of protection no matter its size or makeup. Choc ices all round.

H&M are in hot water for using digitally created bodies to model their swimwear in Scandinavian adverts. Digital bodies with real models' heads on top, that is. I can understand why the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation got in a tizz but I was delighted. Even models aren't physically perfect enough to be models. What a relief. Come 2018 the runways will be walked by specially created androids and we can all worry about better things than waist size. While munching another cake. Hoorah.

ASDA this week provided me with milk, eggs and a whirl in a time machine. A wee meander down the baking aisle showed the supermarket has divided its own-brand cake decorations into two categories: Little Heroes and Little Princesses. What's that expression the kids use these days? Oh, yeah: *facepalm*.