JUMPING THE GUN AND BECOMING A TWIT

I’m beginning to think that, as a family we’re not very patient, which is ironic because recently rather a lot of us have been patients. Whilst this is not the place for me to discuss our ongoing family saga (see “The Whole Sorry Saga” parts 1-14 [and counting] for those delights) I just want to reflect this morning on our tendency to “jump the gun”. I’ve never been one for being late. In fact it causes me a great deal of anxiety if I even think I’m going to be late. It may well be a family thing, but I personally think that it came from my morning paper round when I was a teenager. I would get up extraordinarily early, as I still do to this day, and head off into the darkness in my brown Snorkel coat and very often it was I who had to wake the Newsagent from his slumbers by rapping on their door knocker in a way that I suspect made me a less than popular employee. In later years a group of us used to work overtime at weekends and would, by mutual agreement, start at 4.00AM just so that, when we  had finished our eight hour stint, we still had some of our day left to enjoy (or sleep through, depending on stamina levels). All this obsession with being punctual has led to me setting off stupidly early for most things nowadays and spending a lot of the precious hours of my existence sitting in car parks or being unfashionably early for the kinds of parties I no longer attend. Even now I will ridiculously over-estimate the amount of time it takes to get anywhere at all and allow massive margins for the unexpected, which then unexpectedly fails to materialize. Someone once told me that I should “expect the unexpected”, but I’ve been expecting it for years and it seldom turns up.

How very predictable.

So how is this relevant to matters familial this morning? Well, yesterday my mother became convinced that first she was not and then she very much was going to be sent home from hospital and managed to persuade my sister of the imminence of these events. Despite my many warnings that we have been in this situation so many, many times before, my sister decided to load up her car and drag her sickly body up the various motorways so that she could be here for this happy event. It turns out, of course that “Mr. Cautious” knew what he was talking about and my sister is now kicking her heels in that oh-so-familiar way that I also share, waiting for matters to develop. I don’t know, perhaps it is genetic. My mother used to start packing her suitcases for our late summer holidays in January (that’s probably only remotely amusing if you’re a Northern Hemisphere kind of person, by the way) so I guess we must have got the habit from somewhere.

But then it was a day full of small frustrations. At one point mid-morning I heard the soft flutter of the letterbox and thought to myself “Ah! Another flyer from a curry house!” and set off down the old staircase to investigate. Various metaphorical blood vessels then proceded to burst when I found, not a list of tempting treats from one of the exotic food emporia that are now what we have instead of shops on our high street here in Lesser Blogfordshire, but another “We tried to deliver… Sorry you were out!” card lying on the doormat. Strange that I managed to hear those soft flutterings but failed completely to hear any rat-a-tat-tatting on the hefty door knocker that hangs but two feet above that very slot in the door. Do you think, perhaps, that Mr. Parcel Postman (regular Postie had already delivered my Valentine’s love notes from the credit card company and the gas company earlier) let’s be generous and say ‘forgot’ to knock and just assumed that I wasn’t in? Ah well, that’s another five mile round trip I’ll have to do sometime, I guess, although it’s playing havoc with my carbon footprint. I found myself wondering how entertaining a film called “The Postman Never Rings At All” might have been…? Lana would have had a dull old morning in the kitchen round here.

I finally decided to go along with living down to my public persona and become a “twit” which is as close to selling out as I’m ever likely to manage, although even I can see the rank hypocrisy of it. Somehow I came to a headspace that had decided that posting my links to Lesser Blogfordshire didn’t seem to sit quite rightly in the wacky upbeat fun, fun, fun world of FizzBok any more as I was being more “Captain Gloomy” than “Captain Happy”. “How”, thought I, “am I to let my chums know about my rantings and ravings by other means…?” So, I examined the five little clicky boxes at the bottom of the page and thought “twit” and lo, after a small amount of account opening jiggery-pokery, there I was, lurking in a brave new “World of Twit” that I don’t fully understand yet and which I suspect that I am utterly unsuited for as I might just prove to be habitually too verbose for it’s limited character allowance. Almost immediately I received an email telling me that I have a ‘follower’ but this sadly failed to manifest itself on the actual webpage – I suspect a 24 hour delay but I’m probably wrong – and so the trickle of little frustrations have already begun seeping in to another wondrous world, and I’d barely had time to unpack.

So now I’m freshly loitering in the Twitworld of (as I once heard it described) “People I like that I don’t know, as opposed to…” (Well, you get the idea where they went with that one… although you shouldn’t take it personally. I didn’t.). I had to stop going to FizzBok because I would always just happen to glance at a comment that managed to irritate me. The problem was that after I posted my link, I had to go over there to ‘log out’ (There I go using all the modern terminology!) from the site and some small string of letters would always manage to leap from the screen and try to throttle my brain. Take, for example, this recent exchange which I was really saving for another rant on another day – and probably still will:

BBC ON THIS DAY 930 1959: Buddy Holly killed in air crash

[NAME DELETED] likes this.

Likes this? Likes this?? Oh good grief… Maybe it’s me but that particular system seems fundamentally flawed in some way. On a happier linguistic note, I was rather more pleased with this accidental couplet that sprang out of our chat here in Lesser Blogfordshire yesterday evening, and with which I choose to end my babblings for another day:

She came downstairs,

and distracted me with éclairs.