Helen Walne’s Human League
I’m all over Twitter like a rash. Okay, more truthfully, I’m all over it like a tiny bite from a dwarf flea that has broken legs.
I have no idea how it really works or why I’m on it. What I do know is that I got sick of my friend James hounding me about my cyber scepticism.
“Dude, you need a website,” he would tell me over expensive beers. “And Twitter. Everyone who’s anyone has it: Stephen Fry, that photographer who takes pictures of dead fish, Piers Morgan.”
“Yes, but so does my sister,” I muttered. “She writes about her nail varnish and how you can’t get decent penlight batteries any more.”
James is my age but wears white trainers and glasses with see-through frames. He knows about Google analytics, internet spiders, and how to download the new Radiohead album. I eventually paid him to design and set up a website for me – and he attached a Twitter account.
I am painfully aware that if I want to be in, I have to be plugged in.
If I finally decide to make that prototype wheelbarrow with the built-in bar counter (with optional bartender), launch my smoking yoga classes, or write that book about the sex organs of baby pigeons, having a website will allegedly stand me in good stead.
I already have an internet presence. Various web wastrels have deployed their spiders to cull – or, rather, murder – stories I have written.
The result is that garbled bits of my work now appear on sites marketing dentures, amphibian booties, slug pellets and cashmere jumpers. There are also some poems I wrote at university which, for various reasons, I hope my mother never sees.
But apparently what is needed is not just a presence, but my very own platform from which I can holler, puff out my chest and lie about how fabulous I am. It’s the kind of platform I’d sooner fling myself from.
The website stuff is easy. I e-mail James copy and he uploads it onto the site.
But Twitter is a whole different thing. With its 140-character limit, it’s like being at a Buddhist retreat where you’re only allowed to talk when you’re asking someone to pass the salt.
I’m a natural squawker. I don’t chirp or chirrup, and I certainly don’t tweet.
I like detail. I like curvaceous, fatty language. I like making up words such as Paulpietersburoughmeteenskootsville.
But with Twitter, you’ve got to keep it short and sweet. And, seemingly, you’ve got to do it a lot. Stephen Fry is either the biggest narcissist in the world, or he’s been admitted to hospital with verbal diarrhoea with nothing but an iPhone for company.
While I have warily embraced my tweet life, there are three problems:
1. My old Nokia is not a smart phone. In fact, it is a supremely dumb phone. It can’t connect to the internet, let alone to B’s fancy Samsung. When he calls me on the train, it sounds as though he’s in an underground cavern with a Serb hitman who’s stuffed a sock in his mouth.
“So you want me to climb a tree and then go to the milk?” I ask, straining to make sense of his words. “No,” B answers, “I gwwookser ghhhtshett bbuogaloo ffogheasght.”
And because my phone has the connectivity of Kathy Bates’s adipose tissue, I can’t tweet wherever I am and have to write down my thoughts and post them later. So much for spontaneity.
2. A teacher in England shares my name and has claimed @helenwalne for herself, which is very selfish considering that her tweets are about her clubbing experiences in Leicester and the last one she posted was more than a year ago.
Worse, I don’t know how to log on to my own account, so have to access it through the other Helen Walne. I am not a person in my own right.
3. I only have three followers (thank you Julia, Morné and James), so my tweeting is like that of an asthmatic dove in a forest: if no one hears it, does it exist?
I’m still not sure why I’m doing it.
Certainly, it will help me to be concise and pithy. I’ll soon be able to write columns in haiku format.
I also like the fact that I’m free to say what I like and I can swear.
And with the internet already clogged with an estimated 190 million Twitter users, it’s strangely comforting to know that my verbal constipation is just a tiny floater in a sea of gigabyte guano.