Twitter biogs; what the...?

If you’re signed up to twitter, you might remember what it was like when you first joined.  Once you’ve registered your name, which of course isn’t your actual name but a bastardised version because someone else has already registered your name.  It’s then straight down to business...write something....hhhmmm.    

‘Twitter’ kindly offers the advice of... start following people.  Terrific; who? Unless you already know someone on twitter the first port of call is your favourite celebrities. This gives you confidence; you actually get to read what people, whom you admire, are talking about.  You feel part of their inner circle.  So you dip your toe and write a few tweets; really whacky, crazy stuff like... ‘I need coffee’...or ‘is it wine o’clock yet’. Hilarious.  Then it dawns on you, they don’t actually read your tweets because they’re not following you back – why would they? 

If you want people to follow you, you have to trawl through ‘the no-bodies’. You obviously don’t want to follow a psychopathic killer, which you suspect some of them are, so you need to ‘find out’ about them first. That means reading their biogs.

When you write your biog, twitter gives you only 140 characters to sum up your entire existence.  Who you are; what you do and somewhere in there you have to get in a pitch for people to follow you as well. This is tight. Your biog is your big chance to hook as many new followers as possible.  It’s fair to say that these 140 characters are pretty important so why do people write such banal, crap for their biogs? 

From those I’ve read; there seems to be several recurring themes; one of them is the ‘I’m totally mad’ theme.  “Yeah I’m mad me, huh huh, I’m so crazy and interesting you must follow me, it’ll be great fun!  What that actually says is ‘I’m so dull I have to pretend to be ‘mad and crazy’. Surely those people that are genuinely ‘out there’ never say so. ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know, was not something Lord Byron said of himself

Another common theme is to mention how much wine you drink.  Remember when you were about 16, the big thing was to tell your friends how much alcohol you could drink.  It was boring then and it’s a story that doesn’t improve with age.  Again how many interesting eccentric drunks tell people how much they drink...they don’t need to, they’re too busy being eccentric and interesting.  ‘I’m mad me and I drink too much wine’ are the two things that say exactly the opposite of ‘what it says on the tin’. 

The one that really puzzles me though and seems to pop up all over the place is this; ‘cat lover’. Am I missing something with the whole cat lover thing?  Is it some secret underground club more powerful than the Freemasons?  You’ve only got 140 characters to do the job of selling yourself, if your choice of pet is that high on your priority list...you need to get out more.

And don’t write some philosophical quote from someone who was interesting but is now dead – that doesn’t get you off the hook and it doesn’t make you as interesting as they were, it says I have no original thoughts of my own.

I beg you twitter users, make your twitter biog; funny, interesting, or original.  The human eye reads fast and 140 characters is not long enough; the reader will have imbibed some of the banal, crap before they wince and move on.  By this time it will have soiled their minds and a constant drip feed of crap biogs can’t be good for anyone. Do you follow?

Penis envy

I was listening to Gardener’s Question Time the other day and it reminded me of the time when I went to one of their recordings and asked a question with a difference.

Have you ever been to a BBC radio broadcast?  It’s quite exciting but completely without glamour. The outside broadcasts are usually held in a village hall, where the local gardening society or Women’s Institute fills the room with plastic chairs, silver hair and diseased plants.  At one end of the hall there’s a table with a green ‘snooker style’ cloth over it.  This is where the experts sit. 

When the crew arrives with the recording gear the sight of the equipment causes a buzz of excitement in the hall. Then something extraordinary happens; it makes the people in the audience regress to 1950’s England. Everyone in the audience is obsequiously polite.  They all suddenly speak with clipped ‘BBC’ accents and they roar with laughter at the weakest of jokes from the panel. 

The members of the audience that get to ask a question go even further, just as the microphone approaches them you can see them nervously twitching and then on cue they revert to a language not heard since the days of black and white TV...“I recently purchased a flowering cherry tree...!” Purchased; there’s a word I haven’t used since, well the 1950’s.

Most of the audience are posh women, keen to show off their gardening knowledge by using as many Latin plant names as possible.  However they like to pronounce them slightly differently to everyone else.  At the recording I went to a very proper lady asked a question about her Scots Pine tree.  She of course used its Latin name of Pinus sylvestris. However she pronounced it as Penis sylvestris.  It went something like this... “I have a magnificent Penis sylvestris but it’s leaning to the left....” She didn’t even flinch.  Nor did the rest of the audience; I damn near wet myself.

This pronunciation tolerance got me thinking and immediately a plan hatched in my mind.  I had brought with me, two diseased plants and was hoping the panel could tell me what was wrong with them.  I knew what they were called but they didn’t know that. 

When the next question opportunity came along I shot my hand up and managed to get the attention of the man with the microphone and he came straight over.  “I’ve been given these two plants as presents but I’m not sure of their correct Latin names” I said loud and clear through the microphone.  “The friend that gave them to me says they’re called Biggus dickus and Sillius soddus, is this correct?” You should have seen their faces.

Living next door to Kate Winslet

I have a confession to make.  I have village envy.  When I first moved to Surrey I was 20 years younger and so wanted to be as close to the lights of London as I could afford.  Kingston-upon-Thames was about right.  It had cool bars, nightclubs, the river and crucially a late train home.  As I got older however and started taking trips into ‘the country’ at weekends I discovered what I was missing.  The hills, the views, the country pubs; I took one look and thought...this is what I want. 

I was ready to give up the busy north of Surrey and settle down in the gorgeous village of Shere.  I could keep pigs, wear wellies, have a shed, smoke cigars, write best-selling novels and who knows maybe bump into Kate Winslet filming ‘The Holiday 2’.  Apparently in Shere, it always snows on Christmas day and in the summer it only rains when everyone is asleep.  Just one small problem, I wasn’t the first to notice all this which made it a bit pricey.  Ok...I’ll just phone my elderly millionaire uncle.  Oh I forgot...I don’t have one.

Since then I’m afraid living in Shere has remained a dream and all the while the hands of time seem to turn faster and faster. As the great bard Rod Stewart once wrote, time is a thief when you’re undecided. 

I even toyed with the idea of moving away to the Cotswolds, where you get more for your money; so I really could keep pigs, wear wellies and, from what I understand, there is a much greater chance of actually bumping into Kate Winslet.  I drove up there one weekend with my family to see if it’s all it’s cracked up to be. And yes it’s beautiful.  But it was only when I started entertaining the idea of moving away that I realised just what I would miss right here on my doorstep. 

At the moment we can walk to the school that my son loves and which both Ofsted and I; think is outstanding.  I’ve got the nation’s most visited attraction, Hampton Court Palace just around the corner.  I’ve got the beautiful Richmond Park and Bushy Park a short car ride away, I’ve got The Rose theatre in Kingston, I’ve got the river and the boats and in the future my children will have the bright lights of London right on their door-step.  Not sure if they’d thank me for moving too far away from that in years to come.

So in fact I have more than I realise and ok I’d like a bigger garden or an extra bedroom but maybe there’s a valuable lesson to be learned here.  Too much of life can be missed while you’re chasing the next thing. And wasn’t it precisely that constant chasing that got us all into the financial predicament we currently find ourselves in? 

So maybe I’ll just enjoy what I have for the time being and...Miss Winslet if you’re reading this I’m afraid we aren’t going to be neighbours after all...sorry about that. 

Inspired by David Attenborough

Here we go again.  January, the monday morning of the year. I have only one word to say about January....Bleurgh!   I know we’re all supposed to be positive and eager to greet the challenges of a new year but if I’m honest I hate January. My New Year’s resolution doesn’t help much either, it’s the same every year and I’ve never managed to keep it.  Maybe ‘buy a flat in the south of France’ is a bit unrealistic.    

It’s not just the weather and the dark nights of January I struggle with. Finding things to occupy young children at this time of year can be especially difficult.  And then I had an epiphany.  I discovered the delight that is The Educational Museum in Haslemere. In the depths of winter this place is nothing short of a miracle.

My children of course, love visits to the Natural History Museum in London but sometimes the thought of getting them all packed up and organised for a train ride and then a tube ride is more than I can face, especially when everyone is coughing and sneezing.  So to discover a mini version of their favourite museum, only 20 minutes car ride away was a joy.        

It was only seven years after the natural history museum itself was opened that this ‘little brother version’ in Haslemere was set up.  In fact next year (2013) sees its 125 year anniversary, where they’ll have all sorts of exhibits and ways of celebrating.  For details about events and opening times look at the website www.haslemeremuseum.co.uk. 

For a small museum this place punches well above its weight.  It is full of fascinating things to engage inquisitive minds. There are 4 billion year old meteorites that date back to the beginning of the earth and loads of stuff about the solar system. 

My children love the animated film Madagascar so to see zebras, giraffes and lions displayed in there, really captures their imaginations; for them these exhibits come to life. Like all children they also love big stuff so the full size Siberian bear was an instant hit. And I’m convinced the giant Japanese spider crab is bigger than my first car. 

There’s a great little interactive dinosaur feature, where you put your hand into a hole in a wall and all of a sudden a dinosaur starts roaring and stomping it’s feet.  Even though my children have done this plenty of times, they never tire of it. And that’s the point.  Little museums like this are enormously important to young minds.  Only a few months ago I went to a similar museum in Leicestershire where the great Sir David Attenborough was giving a talk.  He first visited this museum over 75 years ago when he was a little boy and he still remembers that first visit to this day.  This was the place that inspired him to follow his chosen career path. So take your children to the Educational Museum in Haslemere, who knows it could be the making of them.