SHARING THE MOMENT

Mars.

It’s a very long way away and I’m never likely to ever go there but, for a brief moment in my life recently, Mars became something of a preoccupation.

And not just for me, either…

There were a lot of us out there enjoying that possibly slightly “geeky” (for want of a better word) moment when “Curiosity” got the better of us and we waited, chewing our nails, for the aptly described nail-biting decent to be over and that happy message to come through loud and clear that the largest scientific project to ever be sent to Mars had successfully landed.

A lot of people criticise “TwitWorld” including myself (“Why do I need to know what Stephen Fry is having for his breakfast this morning? Ho! Ho!”). I was extremely critical of it before I started using it and, on occasions, have been even more critical since I have been using it, as any of you who have read these various rants (and remembered at least some of the content of them…) will already be aware.

TwitWorld is, after all, capable of being a quite terrifying and humbling place and, it seems, it really is sometimes not for the faint-hearted. Although I shouldn’t let that terrify you. After all, I am the absolute epitome of “faint-hearted” (in the dictionary under that entry it should really say “see Martin”) and I seem to be surviving, albeit with occasional times when I wonder about what the point of it all is, other times when I abandon it completely as a waste of time, and yet further times when I feel the need to run away and hide such is the complete tit that I feel that I have just made of myself.

Thankfully, those latter times I usually get away with because it’s very easy to be ignored in TwitWorld and, if it’s “attention” that you seek but in reality you remain a rather obscure nonentity, then it can be a rather brutal crucible of understanding about your place in the big wide world.

Happily, wholesale “attention seeking” is not really one of the things on my own long list of shortcomings, so I don’t have to worry about that facet of the beast. Don’t get me wrong, like with these outpourings, I do love it when my words get read and I can engage with “like minded” individuals, but it’s not the primary objective, thankfully.

My own first tentative steps into “signing up” were taken when Jonathan Agnew started using his TwitWorld account to pass on extra tidbits of information to his “followers” during the test match. Much would be made of various things he was looking at and he would take pictures of things like Henry Blofeld’s astounding trousers, or geriatric lawnmowers, or Geoffrey Boycott’s morning ablutions when touring, and post them up, for anyone who wanted to look at them to see.

This proved far too tempting for a self-confessed completist like myself who still chunners through the Test Matches about how I don’t get to see much of the play since the games were sold off to private television. After all, for a couple of years, out here beyond the back of beyond, where television only reaches us courtesy of a tiny relay tower that seems incapable - even now - of carrying more than two dozen signals, “Highlights” on Channel 5 were not something that we could see in our “three-and-a-half channel” world…

This, of course, has changed since the “switchover” to Digital TV, so these days I do at least vaguely recognise the players about which the commentators are speaking, but back in those dark days, any extra visual information was gratefully received and so my date with destiny and becoming one of the Twitterati was inevitable.

At first it was all rather pointless as I dipped my toe, wrote something pointless and then deleted it again after I’d thought about it for a while. Happily, with only less than half a dozen people watching, I was able, like the S.A.S., to get in and out without anyone really noticing.

My experiences recently have been happier, though, as I exchange the odd and occasional pithy “conversation” with jolly “cyber-chums” all over the planet and it was through Twitter that I was able to find the live feed to NASA TV in the early hours of that exciting Monday morning as most of the people that I knew were still slumbering like the relatively sane people they must be.

The slightly “geeky” nutters like myself, however, were sitting at our computers watching a lot of men and women who were seriously “geeky” professionals, albeit professionals with slightly academically-styled haircuts (or perhaps “lack of style” would be more appropriate… Such minds are on higher things, I suppose…) getting tense and pacing around nervously as all their expensive work plummeted unseen down through a distant alien atmosphere…

So, when the news came through that touchdown had indeed been achieved, it was with a certain amount of joy that I was able to pass on and share in the various outpourings of joy from around the globe. Equally, I could also rail against the corresponding cynicism – after all Twitter is a very democratic place in which all voices and opinions – now matter how extremely opposed to each other – can be heard, read and, if you choose, dismissed or accepted as you choose to.

Anyway, for a few minutes my “Yayys!” could be added to those of other like-minded souls all around the world as we shared what, for us, was a very special moment, and for a few minutes (before I started embarrassing myself with feeble minded observations about three-legged Martian chickens) I felt part of something rather wonderful.