Category: Personal Page 9 of 19

It Has Been… Oh, Nearly Three Decades Since I Should Have Made This Confession

On 15/07/2009

In Link, Personal, Pictures, TV, Uncategorized

Back in 1981, I was a contestant on the children’s TV quiz show Runaround. That’s right, m’dears, at the tender age of 10, I first saw the heady heights of fame… or, at least, was on a networked TV programme.

For those of you who don’t remember Runaround, it was essentially a multiple-choice quiz; a question was asked, with the possible answers shown on the wall at the far side of the studio. When the host – Mike ‘Frank Butcher off EastEnders‘ Reid shouted “G-g-g-g-g-g-g-go!”, the contestants would run across the studio and stand in front of the answer they thought was correct. After a few seconds in which you could change your mind, the answer was revealed by a light being shone on the contestants who’d got it right. If you got it wrong, you went into the ‘Sin Bin’, and were out of the game until… er, I forget, but if you got it right, you picked up a coloured ball. The contestant with the most balls at the end of the show was the winner.

Look, I know it sounds basic, but it was a simpler time, all right? We didn’t have crack cocaine and Nintendo iPlaypods, we had to make do with simpler pleasures.

Anyway, this was all filmed at the Southampton studios of now-defunct regional broadcasters Southern Television. To get contestants, they’d come to nearby schools and ask a number of questions – I, strangely enough, got in because I was able to show I had a name beginning with a certain letter of the alphabet, and also had a particular number of pets at home. I didn’t lie about either of these things, but I probably could have. Still, they weren’t looking for Mastermind contestants, I guess, just kids who could read and run, so the entry requirements weren’t too stringent. Eventually, they had enough contestants from the school (four or five, I think), and a date was set.

The day itself was pretty exciting – we were given a bit of a tour of the building (peeping into a room where they were recording something for How), and taken down to the studio where we’d be filming that afternoon. It was a pretty big studio, and so they filled it was coachloads of schoolkids from the surrounding area, including the schools the contestants were drawn from. Then there was a bit of hanging around, and we changed into our specially-personalised Runaround t-shirts and went down for the filming. To say I was excited was an understatement.

At the start of the show, the contestants (the four or five from my school, plus an opposing team from another school, though it was more about trying to win for yourself than any kind of team effort) would run out through a tunnel-shaped opening, and so as the filming began, we were lined up in the tunnel. And this is the point where I make my torrid confession, here on the interweb, to you. Have you ever been in a TV studio, maybe to watch the filming of a show? Well, if you have, you may have seen a lot of the cameras have small spiral-bound pads clipped to them, giving the camera operators a rundown of the places to focus on, etc. In the tunnel before the show started, there was a camera, and on the running order there I could see that for the first question (about how many days there are in July, I think) answer B was circled.

Yes, I’m not proud of it, but I went for B on the first question, and it was indeed correct. I cheated. Not a good thing…

… but there was pretty much instant karma, as I quickly got the next question wrong and spent a lot of time in the Sin Bin, and didn’t come anywhere near winning, so verily cheats did not prosper that day. And rightly so. Who knows how different it might have been if I’d got the first question wrong?

Anyway, whilst I didn’t win the top prize – a portable TV – when it came to the tiebreaker between two boys from the other school, I did have my first insight into the wanton trickery of the televisual medium; the tiebreak question was “What is the fourth month of the year?” and it took them about seven guesses to get it right, but when the show was broadcast, the boy who won appeared to have replied pretty much instantaneously. Oh, television editing, you are misleading.

My prize, for those of you who are interested, was a then-top-of-the-line digital watch; which meant that it told the time, date, and – brace yourself – seconds. About five years later, it was pretty much the sort of watch they’d give you free if you bought £5 worth of petrol, but that’s the march of progress for you.

So, having learned a salutary lesson about cheating, I made my way home, with my watch, Mike Reid’s autograph on the back of one of the question cards (we moved house several months later, and it was lost in the move), and of course my personalised Runaround t-shirt.

Speaking of which, writing about the experience has inspired me to dig out the t-shirt and put it on for old times’ sake. Of course, I was a lot smaller then, but let’s see if I can still get into it…

…Oh.

Looks like I’ve grown a bit in the last 28 years, then.

Neither Like David In Appearance Nor Able To Create David

By John

On 12/07/2009

In Personal, Pictures, Uncategorized

As the week draws to its end, I just wanted to share with you, my lovely readers, one important lesson which I’ve learned in the last few days:

Unless you actually are a sculptor, or have a hand as steady as a professional stonemason, do not attempt to remove ice from a freezer compartment with a screwdriver and hammer.

Yes, I am an idiot. Still, the new fridge-freezer looks good in the kitchen.

On Showgirls, And Marcus Aurelius, And How They Are Connected

By John

On 09/07/2009

In Film, Link, Personal, Pictures, TV, Uncategorized, Writing

I referred to the Monty Python Spanish Inquisition Sketch the other day (in this post), and that led me to think about its appearance in the film Sliding Doors. Hey, that’s how my mind works.

For those of you who haven’t seen this film (and I’ve only seen it once, at the time of its cinema release), John Hannah recites lines from the Spanish Inquisition sketch to a table of hysterically impressed friends, including Gwyneth Paltrow – in fact, his Python performance kind of forms part of his wooing of her character in the film. The people around the table are laughing a lot at this bit in the film, including women, which didn’t ring true for me, as I was the kind of spotty indoorsy teenager who’d learn Monty Python sketches off by heart, and as much as women like a laugh and like comedy, very few of them are particularly keen to hear you recite other people’s comedy material. Especially a sketch as reliant on visual aspects and incidental music as that one.

Anyway, as an aspect of the film in which we’re supposed to think Hannah’s character’s funny or likeable, it didn’t work for me. In a similar way, I once found myself watching Showgirls to see if it was as bad as it was said to be (it was), and about twenty minutes in (I think – it was just before the first ad break, and I switched it off then) there was a big song and dance number. The main character, played by Elizabeth Berkeley, watches this show on stage, and is utterly captivated by it. I, on the other hand, thought it was a pretty risible sequence featuring semi-naked people cavorting amidst model volcanoes.

I turned off the TV at this point, as it seemed pretty clear that the main character was going to be inspired to want to do this kind of dancing, and I would find myself laughing at it, and that would just be mean. Well, if I’m honest, I wouldn’t have minded a laugh, but as I was sharing a house at the time, I didn’t want anyone to come into the lounge and think I was watching it for the nipples instead of the giggles.

Hmm, those last three paragraphs make it sound as if I’m just having a go at other people to make my point (and I do have one), so let me share a similar confession about my own writing; some years ago, I wrote a novel (unpublished, and with hindsight that’s probably fair) called Fall From Grace. It was essentially a re-telling of the fall of Lucifer, set within a modern-day Evangelical Broadcasting Network – members of staff rebel against the existing regime, get kicked out, seek to take revenge, that sort of thing.

However, in order to make the rebels into underdogs, I needed the evangelical TV station to be successful, and try as I might I just couldn’t write the details of the broadcasts in a way that made this seem likely. Mainly because deep down I couldn’t see a way that, in modern-day England, such a venture would have enormous success – and as a result, the story pretty much asked the reader to take it on trust that, no, really, I promise you, it was very popular. Unfortunately, that creates a situation rather like this:

Reader: These religious broadcasts don’t strike me as that awe-inspiring.
Me: Well, they are. Trust me.
Reader: They wouldn’t convert me.
Me: Well, the people in the book are quite taken with them.
Reader: I don’t know why.
Me: Look, they’re really impressed. Take my word for it.
Reader: I suppose I have to, for the story to make sense.
Me: Yes, you do.
Reader: Hmph.

It doesn’t really matter if a story contains a minor element that doesn’t quite ring true, but if it’s a plot element or a catalyst or a personality trait which actually affects the direction of the story, there’s a more fundamental problem; like watching one of those fight scenes in films where the cuts are just so insanely fast that you can’t tell what’s going on until one person’s left standing and the others are on the ground, you end up just having to accept that it’s happened, even if you don’t know how or why, but of course it introduces a seed of disbelief into your mind, and much of the time stories require that disbelief, like the Brooklyn Bridge, to be well and truly suspended.

Otherwise, you end up just having to take other characters’ word for it; John Hannah’s character is funny, the show in Showgirls really is impressive, and in my personal example, millions of people do tune in every week to watch a religious TV show… and if you don’t believe what the story wants you to believe, or feel the reaction that you’re apparently expected to feel, you’ll be jerked right out of the experience of the story, and that’s never a good thing.

Looking at how this should be done, I watched the first episode of The West Wing again yesterday, and – possible spoilers ahoy – we don’t get to meet the President himself until very near the end of the episode. Instead of the viewer being told for the best part of an hour that he’s quick-witted, supportive of his staff, and articulate, we’re shown it – President Bartlet demonstrates this in a couple of minutes, and at the end of the scene (indeed the episode) you can see why his staff are so loyal to him. That, as Mr Punch would say, is the way to do it.

The Roman Emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius once said “Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one”, and I think the same applies to aspects of plot or character as detailed above. Is a character meant to be funny? Show them being funny, not other people telling them they’re funny. Is something in a story meant to be amazing or startling, and send people’s lives in a new direction? Then the story needs to show it being amazing or startling.

In his (very good) screenwriting book Save The Cat, Blake Snyder stresses the importance of making the reader/viewer care about the main character as early as possible by having them do something funny, likable or heroic in the early scenes – by having them, as it were, ‘save the cat’ on page one, and I think he’s spot-on about this.

As is so often the case, I won’t pretend that I’m making a devastating insight about a requirement of writing here; however, I was quite pleased when all the above churned around inside my head, and I finally realised that all of the examples which sprang to my mind all point to one fundamental principle of writing: Show, Don’t Tell.

I’m Glad They Spelled ‘Professional’ Correctly – This Is Not A Subject Which Benefits From Bringing Professionalism Into Doubt

By John

On 06/07/2009

In London, Personal, Pictures, Uncategorized

Like many people with a letterbox, I’ve become accustomed to coming home to find myself dazzled by a shining sea of glossy junk mail – pizza menus, flyers for estate agents and repair firms, and party political newsletters and the like.

I’ve become kind of jaded to it really, so my immediate reaction is to ignore the stuff – the exact opposite of the hoped-for result, I’m sure – and it takes something quite startling to make me actually pay attention to unsolicited mail.

Which is why the flyer which you can see here (scanned in from the original, hence the scuffmark across the middle from my shoe) caught my attention when it arrived. I’m well aware that there’s a market for this service, but … well, I’d kind of hope that people would do a bit of research beyond waiting for a leaflet on the subject to come through the door.

Tiananmen Ghost Square Dance

By John

On 04/06/2009

In Link, Personal, Pictures, Review, Uncategorized

I don’t know if you’ve seen the film iThree Amigos! or not. It’s not particularly good – it has its moments, but overall it’s a bit obvious and feels somehow self-indulgent. Still, there are far worse things you could see on TV.

My own feelings about iThree Amigos!, though, are rather coloured by the first time I saw it. It was round at a friend’s house, where we watched it on video, and as the film ended and we all agreed we thought it was only so-so, one of us pressed STOP, bringing up the default TV channel, which turned out to be a BBC channel.

Onscreen, Kate Adie was speaking over live footage of people being shot in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. It was 4 June 1989, twenty years ago to this day, and under orders from the government, the army were shooting protesting students. Any lingering traces of feeling lighthearted or flippant after watching the video dropped away pretty sharply.

The exact number of people killed that night is unknown; some reports have it in the thousands, whereas others suggest that hundreds died. Whatever, it’s a matter of historical record that a large number of students died for protesting that night, as a result of an order from their government. Officially speaking, on the other hand… well, it’s pretty much as if the events didn’t occur.

Which is, to my mind, an intellectual insult to physical injury (and far worse); attempting to erase these events from history, as if the past were an Etch-A-Sketch is just plain daft. And given the evidence that it occurred, pretending it didn’t is akin to a government pressing its hands to its ears and singing ner-ner-ner can’t hear you. Though that’s pretty much the overall attitude to human rights from the ruling party in China, it seems (ask the Tibetan people).

I’ve written before about my dislike for the habit of ‘rewriting events’, and I still find it frustrating to this day (mainly because it means a choice of some sort to ignore things which happened in favour of things which didn’t happen), but when it manifests on a national scale, it’s even more alarming.

Granted, the UK isn’t immune to this either – from the way people carry on, you’d think that the nation did nothing but venerate the Princess of Wales constantly before her death, and that nobody at all was fooled at the time by the lies about weapons in Iraq – but it doesn’t tend to end up with tanks rolling into the middle of a protest zone and hundreds of teenagers dying of bullet wounds, only to have their blood and their memory wiped away as if it had never been.

This post, along with a lot of other online information, may not be available to Chinese readers, for which I apologise, though in a way I feel it backs up the point made.

No, I Didn’t Say About Writers Being Coarse (For Many, That’s A Given)

By John

On 03/06/2009

In Link, Personal, Pictures, Uncategorized, Writing

There’s a fairly interesting article-cum-review on the New Yorker magazine’s website this week, about the history and nature of creative writing courses in US academic institutions.

The article’s essentially a review of a book on the subject, but it’s opened and closed by some interesting history of the growth of such courses, and of course a fair amount of discussion of the time-honoured question in relation to creative writing, and indeed one might say writing in almost all its forms: can it be taught?

My personal feelings in relation to this are mixed, and you’ll be unsurprised to learn that this is very much a result of my personal history; my grandfather was a very good storyteller, and my parents encouraged me to read from an early age, and so it was that at about the age of 13 or so I found my brain bent out of shape by reading the work of Alan Moore, Harlan Ellison and Dennis Potter, and the growing realisation that you could do pretty much anything with words.

Just by arranging words in a certain order on the page, or saying them aloud, you could elicit reactions, hold people’s attention and convey information and more, and this still appeals to me to this very day. It’s pretty common for people to say that school wasn’t very supportive of what later becomes their passion, but I have to say that my secondary school, whilst sorely lacking in many regards, was never actively un-supportive of me wanting to do creative writing; there were two English teachers who helped me to do the creative writing option which was available to do as an adjunct to the English Literature A-Level, though with the 20-20 vision of hindsight it’s clear to me that I should have strayed out of my comfort zone a bit and taken English Language as a subject instead of Literature, even if that meant doing the class at the ‘rival’ school down the road.

So I started to write things, mainly for my own amusement at first, and then I started submitting scripts to comics (a bit of the reason for that is given in this post), and I guess that was when I started trying to think about writing in a slightly more technical way, as I guess might be taught in classes and courses.

Much of my approach to writing remains kind of instinctive and gut-level, stemming from basic ‘what if..?’ ideas, but the actual practice of it is a bit more technical now, with conscious decisions about character development, actions being consistent with characters’ personalities, and stuff like that. But as these are usually the fancy icing on the instinctive cake, I suppose I have some kind of uncertainty about whether creative writing courses will focus on the creation or delivery of story, which I tend to see as two different (and at times potentially opposing) things.

That said, I think it’s entirely possible to sharpen the saw, as it were, and there are many very good books written by popular and successful writers about the business of writing (as well as books written by people who’ve arguably been less successful as writers, but some of them are very astute on the technicalities of what works and the like, so they shouldn’t necessarily be dismissed too speedily). I’ve read a few of the good ones, and a couple of the bad ones, and in a strange way the latter are still kind of useful in an way, as they make you feel a bit more certain about your approach to things, even if it’s only because as you read and disagree with the text you’re forced to articulate to yourself just why you don’t agree.

As the New Yorker article alludes to, a ‘workshop’ environment is often used in Creative Writing Courses, and I have to say it’s not something I’d feel necessarily comfortable with; people can take courses for a lot of reasons, and have very different beliefs about what a specific assignment is, or should be, trying to achieve, and so you can end up with a document not written by, but instead critiqued by, committee, which is … well, not necessarily an entirely productive position to be in. And it’s a fairly stark contrast to the TV Writers’ Room environment, which many writers (myself included) would like to see increase in the UK, even if it’s very much a production- and economically-derived situation, for the simple reason that it’s a room full of people who are meant to be pulling in the same direction (oh, and the more important reason that it would make writing a less solitary activity).

I have my doubts about the environment, then, and as I don’t know exactly what’s taught on these courses, I’m rather vague on the content too; the article suggests there’s quite a lot of introspective work, perhaps even adherence to the maxim ‘write what you know’, and having written enough ropey self-absorbed poetry as a teenager (by which I mean a handful of poems, but believe me, that was more than enough), I’m not sure if that’s the way to go. But that’s probably my ignorance of what’s involved manifesting as suspicion.

So, I’d be interested to hear of your experiences of creative writing courses, and assessment of whether, ultimately, they were a good thing for you, and were well-run by people who knew a lot about the nature of storytelling and the like. I’m unsure whether I think they’re best for nurturing a nugget of innate writing tendency or not, really (not that it has any material impact on things; I’m not currently proposing to quit work and take a writing course), so input from people with proper experience and knowledge here would be welcome.

In relation to the sprawling narrative above, I was thinking about my one and only experience of attending a writing group. It happened when I was on the dole for a while, and a friend suggested I come along to the writers’ group arranged by her partner; I did so, and the way it panned out amused me at the time, though I suspect it’d now turn out quite differently.

After a number of people had read out their pieces, many of which were about emotional traumas or relationship upsets or staring out a train window and wondering what life was all about, I read out my offering, a short tale of a man coming across a book which detailed the events of his life, including events yet to come. It was a slightly fantasy-based piece (and might even qualify as ‘magic realism’, though that’s not a term I have much certainty about), and as such it was greeted initially with a slightly awkward silence, and then with some guarded and uncertain but polite comments, leaving me feeling that I’d rather misjudged my offering (and this muted response may well be why I didn’t go to any of the group’s meetings ever again).

Imagining this taking place in the very-different present, though, and given the way that fantasy and science fiction are seen as mainstream if not quite cutting-edge in terms of fiction, I suspect that the person who’d be stared at blankly in such a group today would be the one who read out the emo-style poem about their depth and sensitivity, and the way that the world just doesn’t understand them.

Mind you, being treated as the pariah would be good fuel for that day’s journal entry. Or perhaps even another poem.

In Which I Demonstrate How I Will Cheerfully Accept A Compliment, Even If It’s Not Even Remotely True

By John

On 28/05/2009

In Personal, Pictures, TV, Uncategorized

I was at a wedding last weekend. Well, strictly speaking it was a ‘civil partnership celebration’, but unlike the state of California, I don’t count same-sex couples as second-class citizens, so as far as I’m concerned it was a wedding.

Anyway, I’d made a bit of an effort for the occasion, and was wearing a new jacket-n-trouser-combo, so I was quite pleased when another guest told me I looked like someone famous.
“Really?” I asked, genuinely surprised.
“Yes,” he said. “That chap from TV… Patrick something… Patrick Macnee.”

I was amused by this, and images of the ever-debonair Macnee as John Steed in The Avengers ran through my mind.

“No, hang on, not Macnee,” he said. “Patrick… um…”
As he tried to recall the right name, I became pretty sure it was more likely to turn out to be Patrick Moore from The Sky At Night than Patrick Dempsey from Grey’s Anatomy.
“That’s it!” he said. “Patrick McGoohan!”

As an admirer of The Prisoner, this comparison also amused me (as did the fact that both chaps did some sterling work during what one might see as a classic age of British TV).

“I don’t really see it,” Mrs Soanes said to me a bit later that evening, and I’m afraid I have to agree with her. Not only is it slightly odd that someone might mistake Mr Macnee for Mr McGoohan, it’s also very hard to see many points of similarity between me and either of these two chaps.

Mind you, given that McGoohan was very sharply dressed much of the time in Danger Man and The Prisoner and was reportedly one of the first actors approached to play James Bond onscreen, and that Macnee in The Avengers is seen as sartorially very dapper to this very day, I am more than happy to assume the chap’s comments were related to the fact that I was wearing smart clothing.

The moral of this post? Like so many of us, I am more than happy when (to paraphrase A Midsummer Night’s Dream) compliments aimed at me, and truth, keep little company.

All Things Considered, It’s Probably Best Not To Read This Whilst Eating

By John

On 27/05/2009

In Fish In A Barrel, Link, Personal, Pictures, Uncategorized

In recent years, rather like M’chum Jed, , my metabolism has slowed down, and so I’m now the not-entirely-proud owner of a bit of a belly.

Now, it’s nothing too excessive (though it usually slightly surprises people who’ve known me for years, as historically I’ve tended to the scrawny end of things), and I’m all too aware that if I want to shed it – I mean really want to shed it – then all I have to do is to eat less and move more (running’s usually the best form of exercise for me, but we all have our preferences). It’s pretty straightforward for me, really, though I’m aware there are many people who don’t necessarily lose weight they want to lose with such a linear element of causation.

And so, clustering the shelves of your local pharmacy, there are a number of products which are advertised as helping you lose weight, and I’m sure that many of them live up to their claims. However, slighty less advertised are some of the side effects, and of course that’s what I want to talk about here.

A couple of products on the market (such as Formaline and Alli) act in an interesting way on the digestive system; they stop fat binding in the usual way within the gut, so that it doesn’t hang around, and instead of loitering in the stomach area, it moves on, as undigested fat, through the colon and out into the sunlight.

All very well and good (if you ignore the messing-with-the-natural-order side of things, that is), but it seems that products of this nature are not without side effects. Or, as the website for Alli prefers to call them, “treatment effects”. What kind of side effects, you may be wondering? Have some examples:

Gas with oily spotting
Loose stools
More frequent stools that may be hard to control

Is that nice? I don’t think so. Surely the risk of soiling yourself in public is a deal-breaker? Well, if it’s not, here’s Alli‘s suggestion on how to incorporate the new and ever-present risk of plop leakage into your life:

“You may feel an urgent need to go to the bathroom. Until you have a sense of any treatment effects, it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.”

Let me just repeat that, with emphasis: if you take Alli, “it’s probably a smart idea to wear dark pants, and bring a change of clothes with you to work.”

Sweet fancy Moses! If it’s a choice between being ‘that slightly tubby chap’ or being ‘that 38-year-old guy who smells like his nappy needs changing’, I know which I’d choose.

Just in case you think I’m making this up, here’s the link to the page where Alli detail the side – er, treatment effects of their product. I like the way they try to hide the more soggy possibilities amongst other, more bearable, effects. The textual equivalent of wearing dark trousers when you’ve shat yourself, as it were.

You have been reading the words of John Soanes, sophisticate and high-falutin’ fop about town. Thank you and good day.

Review: ‘High Crimes’ by Michael Kodas

By John

On 24/05/2009

In Books, Link, Personal, Pictures, Review, Uncategorized

My claim in the profile to the right about climbing mountains isn’t an idle one (honest), and so I found this book, detailing some of the not-so-ethical behaviour on Mount Everest, was very interesting. And, at times, unsettling.

Michael Kodas tells the story of his own ill-fated attempt to summit Everest from the Tibetan side, and contrasts it with the death of Nils Antezana, a 69-year-old doctor who died whilst descending on the Nepalese side of the mountain. Whilst Kodas’s attempt floundered due to conflicts within the assembled team, Antezana died alone on the mountain after summiting but being left to descend, alone, by his guide.

These two stories are well told and quite unnerving, but there are other snippets as well – one climber was forced to rappel down one of the routes, and it was only by chance that he looked over his shoulder and realised that the (fixed) rope he was descending had, for no apparent reason, been cut off; had he not turned to look, he would have fallen to his death. Other climbers find their tents or equipment have been stolen as they ascend to higher camps on Everest.

There’s some good analysis of why 2006 saw so many deaths on Everest, and the chilling fact that almost anyone can claim to be a ‘guide’ and charge tens of thousands of pounds to lead you up Everest, even if they’ve had limited – or next to no – experience of guiding.

The book sometimes strays from the central narratives a bit, though it only tends to do this when recounting something else of interest or which adds to the background, so I felt this could be forgiven. The writing style is good and straightforward, and thankfully it generally avoids giving lines of dialogue when no witnesses were to hand, or speculating wildly about events. There’s a lot of referencing and quoting from eyewitnesses, and a bibliography and index to back all this up.

So, if you’re interested in Everest, or climbing generally, this is a solid account of an aspect of the mountain which doesn’t tend to get much coverage. I was lucky enough to be given a copy of the hardback (thanks, Mrs Wife!), but the paperback’s out in November, so you could save your recession-hit pennies until then. Either way, I recommend it.

What Are You Doing? What Are You Doing At The Moment? Post Your Thoughts, Interact With People, And More

By John

On 15/05/2009

In Link, Personal, Pictures, Uncategorized

A friend of mine recently experienced a relationship break-up, and she remarked that one of the things which had most stung had been the fact that her ex-partner had changed their Facebook status to Single.

It struck me that she’s not the first person to have commented on this in recent times, and indeed within the last week or so I heard another tale on a similar theme. One of the reasons it can feel like adding insult to injury, I guess, is the fact that it’s a very public way to state things, akin to issuing a press release or whatever (indeed, Stephen Fry’s explained his use of Twitter as a way to pass information to large numbers of people), and if you’re the other party in a break-up you could well be still rattled by the change of circumstances that seeing it online for all your friends or followers or just anyone with a computer could be a bit unpleasant.

However, I’m also inclined to wonder if part of the reason seeing your ex change their status to Single or It’s Complicated or whatever is because of the way it quite categorically removes any ambiguity. If you’re the split-ee and you’re sitting in a state of shock, in the pre-Status Update days you could listen to suitably melancholy music and wonder if the other person’s sitting at home feeling the same way and wondering if they’ve made a mistake. But now, you turn to your friends for some online chat and support (or, in these modern times, the comfort of near-strangers), only to be told that your ex has changed their status to Single and loving it, and that’s probably not really going to help.

In a way, the development of the facility to update everyone everywhere with anything you’re doing or thinking 24/7/365 means that uncertainty is removed from a lot of time periods which would otherwise be pretty much blank.

Obviously, this is frequently a useful thing:
“Where’s Terry? He’s meant to be meeting us here.”
“He’s running late, he tweeted five minutes ago that he was stuck on a bus which had been diverted through Narnia.”

… but this ease of communication and update can remove some of the mistiness – or indeed mystery – that sometimes adds a certain something to our lives. That person you’ve recently met and are thinking about in that way might be thinking about you in the same way, but then again their status from five minutes ago is ‘Bored’, so you kind of hope that they’re not thinking about you if that’s the case, but on the other hand you’d kind of like it if they were thinking about you and you’d almost have been better off not knowing that little nugget.

In the worst instances – such as the online changes of relationship status mentioned above – the updates take an almost binary form; the person is happy or not, coupled-up or not, and so on, and for another party to see that one has become the other can make it appear more of a leap than it may actually be, which can be uncomfortable to read.

It’s probably because I’ve historically been the dump-ee (I’m talking about the past; don’t get your hopes up about exploiting any desolate desperation on my part, ladies, I’m married now) that I feel empathy with the people I know who’ve smarted at seeing their recent ex update their personal details online, but there is a part of me that feels that the constant capacity to know what everyone you know is doing or thinking about pretty much constantly isn’t necessarily a boon. It’s all a question of how you use these capacities, I guess, and the degree of detail you go into about particular subjects; not only does great detail risk boring your more marginal acquaintances, but it also means that your actual meet-up-in-real-life friends, if too well briefed, may not feel the need to meet up for a catch up, as they already know exactly what you’ve been up to… in more detail than they needed.

You’re probably thinking that I sound luddite and slightly preachy on this, but then again you may also realise that I’m fairly well-placed to demonstrate a certain sanctimony on this subject, given that this blog is, more times than not, wildly impersonal and utterly lacking in any kind of content whatsover; the signal to noise ratio, I think you’d agree, is emphatically in favour of noise, leading to the content being, all too often, more of a 0 than a 1.