Aversion therapy - Or, Thing 7 re-re-re-revisited [again]

Right then, I resolve, spurred on by Aidan's convincing and well-presented reasons why I should embrace Twitter, I'm going to conquer this irrational aversion. He promises no mentions of breakfast et al. Library Wanderer says I'll find 'less rubbish than you think'. And Andy Priestner has already warned me its not just about being off the Cool Wall - my ability to keep up in my job will be compromised. So once again, much in the spirit of 'And now I'm going to clean the toilet', I have a little rummage around in ... I was going to say 'the cess-pit', but I won't.

It is Saturday morning, 9.30 am, and I decide to visit a well-respected much-followed-by-librarians blog, where one might find the serious, meaty stuff. The zeitgeist before it is even zeitgeist, and most definitely not about people who are thinking of maybe going out later to get a newspaper.

What do I find? I was going to post a screen-shot, it was so ... shocking. With the identifying areas blocked out of course. I've genned up on the law of libel in the past ... but that's another story. Word picture instead. 31 tweets in the last 12 hours, all of them ... deposited ... within 3 hours. Three of them relate to possibly useful online resources [in response to other tweets, mind]. The rest are about this person's private life [including bedroom arrangements and that s/he is about to make a cup of tea] ... or football. Well, how was I to know there was a football game on? OK, fair do's, this person is a fan. Irrational but it's a free country. Sort of. Understandable perhaps that s/he is half-watching the game, half furiously tweeting [If England were in a nailbiting final - oh per-LEASE - would they still be doing that?] Of course not everyone will share the same bizarre and frankly almost socially unacceptable personal interests, but there may be a niche audience somewhere. But - does anyone care that s/he is about to have a cup of tea? Didn't dare scroll down in case bowel movements were described. Not even a mother - not even a Jewish mother - would care about the cup of tea. ... Might about the bowel movements though, come to think of it.

So, I did try, and I did go to one of the most respected tweeters. I keep opening the same old wound because I do so want to be one of the cool people, the tweetoscenti, absorbing the gently falling rays of information outside a Shoreditch pub, conducting a clever conversation and tweeting at the same time all about it. I WANT someone to Take me to the River and to Let Twitter into my Life.


Sorry Aidan and Andy, but whilst you separated your reasons for using Twitter as basically (a) professional and (b) personal interests, the recipient of even a moderate and not-too-taxing number of supposedly all-professionally-aligned bunch of tweets has to do a frankly onerous amount of editing. Like wading through Google results, only 1000 times worse, no refining the query. It is making us work. The football, the kitchen, the bedroom, and for all I know the toilet, are there. In my face. In fairness I am forced to mention that the person under fire [sorry, scrutiny] did warn in one tweet that there will be useful tweets in the day and personal ones at night.

And now I'm going to make a cup of tea, gunpowder and mint, brewed for 4 1/2 minutes exactly in a silver teapot, plus one rich tea and two chocolate digestives on a doily, which does make them taste better, and then I'm going to settle down with 'The People's Friend'. Tell you what happens in 'Daisy's new romance' later. Oh, and you probably need to know that there's a definite twinge in my right thumb and I think I might be getting a cold.

Just one more thing. Cilip tweets? Why would I want tweets about a cleaning product?