How to Leave Twitter by Grace Dent

This morning I received a tweet from someone calling them self @gracedent telling me that the book rabbit has done a big word poo this morning in your device, and, sure enough: How to Leave Twitter: My Time as Queen of the Universe and Why This Must Stop was lurking in my Kindle.


It changed my life. Previously if I had come across the characters, LOLZ, CUTE KITTENS DOING STUFF ROFL!!! I would merely have thought, "don't you know what the shift key is for, moron?" Thereby cutting myself off from the myriad delights of abbreviations, excessive capitalisation and pictures of kittens being cute in less than 140 characters.
How wrong I was. I see now that if Proust were alive today he wouldn't bother with seven volumes of À la recherche du temps perdu when he could shown us all he was a catty old queen with a simple "Rhianna's arse looks huge in that," and have space left over to link to a picture of a manatee.


I did learn one essential thing from this book; while I had spent the last week convincing myself that I was following current affairs by avidly keeping abreast of the latest revelations of the latest naughtiness from Murdoch's playthings in Wapping what I was really doing was sinking ever-deeper into 'the desktop multi-application spiralling circle of hell syndrome'. It's real, it happened to me, even down to having both Tweetdeck open and a browser window open on www.twitter.com and flicking between them as if I'll somehow miss something if I only have one open. Oh and I've never, ever got 'remnants of an internet porn foray' on my computer. Ever. It must have been the cat walking across the keyboard which typed in THAT address.
Even as a relative Twitter novice there was much that had me nodding in recognition, 'the twaddlings of egomaniacs, A-grade inanity, adverts, charity begging, tedious social climbing.' - oh yes, I've seen that. But there was one thing she bangs on about which I hadn't noticed. People having a laugh? Fun? Not really concepts I'm with which I'm altogether au fait, I'm afraid.
Perhaps if I followed cool people like Grace Dent and Caitlin Moran I'd get all the fun she's always going on about. Ah. Right at the end there's several pages of 'why important people like me simply don't have time to reply to all the plebs, sorry.' Maybe she could give me the addresses of @josiedrivel, @suziecamel or maybe even '@SamCram, secretly very boring man. I'd have a lot in common with him.
Or maybe this is the secret of twitter after all that it's a way of being ignored by celebrities in real time. Oh dear, that sounds bitter. I've got to go, Tweetdeck just bleeped, bound to be something important.

PS.  Argh.  One thing I do have in common with Ms Dent: leaving blog posts with broken HTML.  It's not all supposed to be double spaced but I can't figure out how to cure it.

Twitter, Good, Bad and...

I'm one of those boring people who have always said, "I can't see the point of Twitter."
But, for reasons too tedious to explain, I was cajoled into joining this week and I've been forced to semi-revise my opinion.
On the Good Side.
I thought 'Caitlin Moran's good for a laugh, I'll follow her.  She tweeted about having discussed clown porn on Newsnight.  So I had to go to the iPlayer and watch that.  In discussion with her was Brooke (Belledejour) Magnanti, reminding me she's interesting and leading me to her new blog, which is worth reading.  (Though personally I didn't have enough curiosity to investigate her link to 'Furry Girl's Vegan Porn site:  if you must on your own cabbage be it.)  But I did follow Ms Magnanti's suggestion of watching 'The Apprentice' while people heckled on Twitter.  I had slightly misunderstood the concept:  I thought it had something to do with business, rather than being a contest to find the most unpleasant sociopath at large in the UK today.  And it turned out I wasn't the only person who had never seen it before.  Mark Gatiss was giving his faux-naif commentary, culminating with the wonderful 'Are they all killed at the end?'  To which I couldn't resist adding 'if not why not?'
So Twitter did lead me down some interesting byways.  And without it I'd never have seen this: this wonderful photo.
On the other hand I did subject myself for a couple of days to Graham Linehan's minutely (that's issued every minute, as well as minutely detailed) account of how superinjuctions are preventing us hearing how the CIA are using Iranian torturers to rape indigenous Faroese hackers.  Until I figured out how to switch him off.  Just because someone's a comedy writer by profession doesn't mean their every utterance is funny:  unless they're the magical Caitlin Moran, of course.