FACEBOOK PART I

In her new post-divorce state, my friend Bloggiana has discovered Facebook. When challenged, she says it’s about time she conformed with a 21st century stereotype. She’s going to Parties, she’s Internet Dating and now she’s on Facebook. Soon she’ll be driving a brightly coloured very small car and having a wild affair with a man half her age, we tell her. Bloggiana looks rather perky at the thought.

Facebook, she tells me after a few days, is introducing Bloggiana to all sorts of new people. Her nephews are on it. Her daughter’s friends are on it. Her friends’ daughters are on it. Even her MP is on it. Should we point out the obvious? I ask my friend Jollyosa who is round for tea that day. But we bite our lips because clearly Bloggiana is having so much Facebook fun.

Bloggiana becomes increasingly attached to her laptop. Winds may blow and rivers pour through low-lying semis in Fluxcombe. The Lakeland District Council House Waste Management team may go on strike for weeks and in the local paper, the Spot the Dog competition jackpot may finally be scooped up after two years of accruing. But none of this deters Bloggiana. Resolutely, daily, hourly, she travels the by-ways of the Facebook networks, seeking out old friends, hunting down links to links to links, stalking her prey as resolutely as a Scottish traffic warden.

A few weeks on, Bloggiana bounces into the parlour and says Guess what? I have now got two thousand three hundred and seventy seven friends. No! I exclaim. Yes, she says, contradicting me. How on earth? I ask, frankly stunned. Easy, she replies and before I can pursue the matter, she goes on. AND among them is someone who knows someone who travelled with someone who travelled with me on the Trans-Siberian Express back in 1987. No! I exclaim further. Indeed I have, Bloggiana says, contradicting me a second time.

And indeed she must have. Because a week or two later, I hear Bloggiana on the telephone and she is laughing uproariously. Fragments of half-heard conversation slip into the parlour and they all seem to have a 1987 Trans-Siberian Express theme. War and Peace, I hear; that girl with the terrible BO who thankfully got off in Irkutsk, I hear again. Novisibirsk, Bloggiana blurts out with relish. Oh yes, and the honeymoon bride who, at our Mongolian champagne party, announced – to the tangible chagrin of her honeymoon groom – her passion for anal sex. Yes, howls Bloggiana, I’d forgotten all about that.

The TSE banter goes on for a while. Clearly that journey back in those heady pre-Glaznost days was an epic. Reluctantly I find myself wondering if perhaps there isn’t something to this Facebook malarkey after all. I leave Bloggiana shrieking into her handset. I sneak upstairs to the study. Hit the laptop. And register.