WARNING - This is all a SPECTACULARLY wanky load of drivel written in order to make myself feel a bit better as well as being some sort of vague apology to nobody in particular. If you are in the middle of growing fingernails, I'd recommend you get on with keeping an eye on that unfolding situation rather than wade through this badly written, mostly unintelligible, crapple.
Contains frequent references to Twitter and mild peril.
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Cast your minds back, if you will, to those heady days of the Saturday just gone. Sun was shining and weather was inclement and windy. Some of the country were waiting with baited breath; would JLS hang on at the top of the hit parade, or, would Cher Lloyd reign victorious? Another, mostly older portion of the country also waited with baited breath; would someone please explain what is a JLS or a Cher Lloyd? Whatever happened to that nice Mark Goodyear? He done the charts back in the olden days when lady popstars were still allowed to wear trousers and we had proper music, you know, the Roxette & the Vanilla Ice and all them, the proper, old bands that wrote some of their own songs....
No? Not ringing a bell? Surely you remember how I'd been up the Asian supermarket to stock up on brightly coloured packaging with unidentifiable contents with which to stuff my kitchen cupboards in such a way as to ensure that said coloured packaging falls out of said cupboards at unexpected moments and nearly kills me, like a sort of kitchen Russian roulette?
Still nothing huh?
Oh, and there was this riot going on in Tottenham. Got it? Yeah. Those were some ker-razy days.
So now, forget most of that stuff because it's not relevant. Forget it all except the bit about the Asian supermarket & the rioting. Then forget about the supermarket as well.
And even nower, picture this scene. It is some time mid that Saturday evening. A lady is sitting in bright pink pyjamas which feature a recurring monkey motif. She is not visibly ashamed of this fact. She is staring, slack-jawed, at a computer monitor, browsing banana cake recipes and tapping out inanities on a keyboard and hurling them at an indifferent universe of Twitterers. She is seated with her back to the TV and is listening to a repeat of Marple through earphones that, frankly, are not up to the job. Occasionally, she pauses to shovel baked beans into her yap. She is also a bit pissed on a little bottle of Sake she bought from the ASIAN SUPERMARKET that then fell out of a cupboard & almost killed her.
Reader, would it surprise you to learn that I was that tipsy, baked bean guzzling, monkey-pyjamad, slack-jaw? S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y-NIGHTS! I KNOW how to live!
So. I'm on the Twitter, via the medium of Tweetdeck, which, it goes without saying, was being a tweet hoarding bastard, holding on to dozens of messages then suddenly belching them out in one sudden, violent, extrusion making reading any of said tweets a bit of an ordeal requiring the eye muscles of an Olympic Speed-Reading Champion.
News of the trouble in Tottenham starts filtering into my time-line. I am already in the midst of a drunken twittersation (not a real word) with my cousin, moaning on about being old & not knowing what a jaegerbomb is. I am interspersing these complaints with my usual pointless observations about adverts being a bit shit & offering unsolicited advice re not mixing Sake with chewing gum. I intersperse those interspersations with retweets of the wisdom/rambling/comedy stylings of other people. Some of these retweets concern the riot unfolding in London.
But, as with most things internet, I am not giving any part of twitter my full attention. Ive got Miss Marple knitting in my ear 'oles and pictures of cake clogging up my eye 'oles and a medium amount of strong liquor making me even more moronically stupid and, as it's tweeting rather than speaking we're...er..talking about here, carelessly loud-fingered, than usual.
At some point I notice a tweet directed at me & another person from someone who, I was astounded to discover, not only followed me but actually seemed to be reading the bullshit I pumped into the virtual ether every 15 seconds or so.
This tweet bore the simple legend:
IDIOTS
I am confused. I read it 3 or 4 times. I am still confused. A tiny portion of my brain, which is apparently indifferent to alcohol, and is also, for some reason impersonating Homer Simpson, stage whispers
"I think she means you".
This only further complicates things. Why am I being called an idiot by somebody who, to the best of my knowledge, has never acknowledged my online presence in any fashion before this point?
I re-read the tweet 7 or 8 more times just to be sure. I notice the other named idiot. A-HA! A CLUE!
I trawl back through my own mindless out-pourings. Even in my thick-headed state I start to realise that my own time-line resembles the ravings of a crazy person. One moment I'm offering complete strangers Google+ invites because I, you will be amazed to discover, do not have 150 friends, acquaintances or even enemies to offer them to, then, seconds later, farting out a stream of terrible puns as part of some hashtag game I have clearly misunderstood the premise for. And, mixed in with all this garbage, are retweets which alternate between making light of people burning down their own neighbourhoods and forwarding bits of information about it. And, when viewed in chronological order, well, it makes me look like a bit of a dick. I mean, if I stood outside bellowing stuff like
"I'm sorry Hazelnut Mikado but today I met Green Tea Pocky & we are very much in love. Ive left your stuff by the front door."
followed up with
"A-HA! Ive got it. That annoying divey boy thats all up in the adverts? Spencer fucking Moon. It's been bugging me for ooh minutes at least."
and
"I Dram The Walrus #weightsandmeasuresmusic"
at passers-by I'd be, like, put on an ASBO at the very least. Or given a spot on Michael McIntyre's roadshow.
I locate a retweet in my own time-line that I don't remember seeing before. The gist of it seemed to be about not bragging about what an awesome time you had burning down that carpet shop in case the Metropolitan scuffers get to hear about it. It doesn't reflect my feelings about the situation & I'm momentarily perplexed as to why I'd have sent it out. I attempt many, many bloody times over to delete the thing but Tweetdeck decides to be a knob about it and not co-operate. I consider appealing to my accuser on the grounds that "Honestly I have No Idea How That Got In There Guv" but realise that that's exactly the kind of thing someone who's been caught out being a bit of a dick would say.
I look back through the timeline of people I'm following to see if I can find out whose words I meant to
"Oh, Hi there @twitterperson who thought me a callous idiot for retweeting dubious advice regarding not blabbing your criminal exploits round the pubs of London. Nah mate. You got me all wrong. I'm an entirely different type of callous idiot who apparently intended to retweet a joke about a mentally ill footballer who...wait...why are you blocking me? Hello? Hello?"
And I, metaphorically, look at myself and go
"What you doing? What the FUCK. Are. You. Doing?"
End OF Act I
