For those of you who haven’t experienced Twitter I ask you to stop reading now. I offer no definitions, no useful information and no links. You don’t need to read this posting, get on with your life and ignore it. A life without Twitter is a richer life indeed.

A few days ago, Leigh explained Twitter to me and made it all a little more clear to me. Some of what she said made sense, I could see some small merit in micro-blogging and as a 55-word story writer, I obviously have a sense that small can often be a lot more beautiful. I don’t object to the concept of Twitter per-se, I object to how people seem to use it. Twitter originally came into my field of annoyance because of its interface to Facebook; now unfortunately it seems to be infecting everything. Twitter updates the Facebook statuses of people so I would get a feed somewhat like this.

• “Pillock is waiting for a train.”

• “Pillock has been waiting for 5 minutes, the train is now late.”

• “Pillock wonders where the train is, and goes to get coffee.”

• “Pillock thinks the coffee is horrible but at least the train is coming soon.”

• “Pillock finally sees the train.”

• “Pillock is getting on the train now.”

• “Pillock doesn’t seem to be able to get a seat, damn train company.”

I will stop now… Unfortunately, this endless microglimpse into somebody’s tedious existence won’t. So why do people do it? I could probably come up with all sorts of theories; some of which would be pretty sound but ultimately it all boils down to the fact they do it because they are obviously quite deranged. Is anybody interested in this? Isn’t there enough quality literature in the world for people to read without them sitting there all day reading this constant stream of dirge? Apparently you can get people’s Twitter feeds sent to your mobile phone – What the fuck? WHY?

Maybe part of the problem is that it seems to be acceptable in the modern work place to be connected to garbage like this. When I was at BT, it used to be a particular bugbear of one of our security people that if people got into work and sat down and read the newspaper for the first 4 hours, they’d probably be sacked but that people seemed to think it was quite acceptable to sit reading random stuff on the Interwebs all day, playing on Facebook and the like. Is it a way that office people can escape work that is more acceptable than sitting in the garden reading Treasure Island? I pity what society will become if it is. On that matter, I find it somewhat ironic that I used to effectively twitter for a living. People used to have to pay $3.00 for each of my 140 word messages but then they were sad wankers, with no other friends than the imaginary people at the other end of their phone. Oh… Wait a minute… Ummm.

Maybe it is part of the new instant news society. As news consumers we seem to expect second by second updates but they aren’t useful, they aren’t healthy and they often do nothing more than confuse the whole situation. The average person isn’t trained as an intelligence analyst and the average person’s mind isn’t quite that fucked up enough to want to be. Nicholas Taleb writes quite well on the subject of the psychological effect of constant streams of updated information in his book “Fooled by randomness” – If you can ever drag yourself away from reading inane twitter messages, weblog postings and RSS feeds full of online comics; I suggest you give it a read.

A few of the armies of the world still employ War Artists; Australia and Britian being two of the key ones. The theory is that a painting can take in all the events of a day, of a battle, of a campaign and merge them all into one single, well thought out visual statement. It can do this far better than a single photograph, a single video clip, a single report. Whilst I don’t argue that very occasionally a potographer or film cameraman does capture an iconic image of war; I do agree with history that the painting does it far better. What’s wrong with people noting their thoughts down in a little notepad, a camera or an electronic organiser and summarising their day later? They could even use Twitter to do it and write something like “Late Trian, Crap Coffee, No Seat – But Long John Silver whisked me away and saved me. Thanks Robert.”

I quite like Giolla’s Livejournal. He occasionally posts a small Haiku that summarises his week which seems like a perfect use for Twitter – Maybe people could learn a lesson from that but they won’t will they. They will continue to think that people are interested in every breath they take. Sting was wrong. We aren’t.

She finally seems to have got bored with basing all of her books on Enid Blyton rejections and moved onto Tolkien’s adolescent period ones instead. This time there is very little Mallory Towers in there; it starts off quite nastily in fact which will probably come as quite a shock to kids reading the book. It then meanders through a whole load of repetitive nonsense and twisted logic before ending up back at Hogwarts, where she fairly pointlessly kills off three random characters in one line, apparently picked by sticking pins in the secondary character list just so that she could say she killed some people. It’s not that badly written. Unlike most of the stuff I write; all of the commas and things are in the right place and there aren’t many spelling mistakes. Of course, you kind of expect this from a woman whose writing has made her the second richest woman in the world but I thought I would mention it just so that I had at least one positive thing to say.

The biggest problem is that I don’t understand the ending and that seems to be something of a major flaw in a book that people have been waiting for, for years. I am told that I would understand the ending if I had re-read the book before and remembered every single minor incident that happened in it but I didn’t. I barely remembered the previous chapter as I was reading on; it was all just so much inconsequential fluff. Anyway – I have read it now and it is over. Thankfully. If you can’t be arsed to read it for yourself everybody important lives, Alan Rickman turned out to be good in the end (another person who dies in less than a paragraph, she really doesn’t write death well at all) and everybody you’d expect to, gets married to one another and they all live happily ever after and send their kids to Hogwarts in a flash forward to 19 years later in the last chapter. In fact, all that is missing, is the line “And they all lived happily ever after” which would have been sweet.

Enough of that drivel anyway! In contrast, I finally read “Moab is my Washpot”; Stephen Fry’s autobiography. I didn’t know much about this at all but since it is one of my closest friend’s favourite books and I do really like Stephen Fry, I decided I had to read it.

It’s pointless saying that it is brilliantly written since anything by Stephen is going to be brilliantly written. What did come as a surprise to me was that it also seemed very honest. Of course, since part of his honesty seems to be about him being a more or less compulsive liar it’s anyone’s guess which bits are to be believed completely but hey, this is Stephen, I’ll believe the moon is made of orange Roquefort if he tells me so.

I am not going to write a review; it’s an autobiography and I suspect a rather enlarged letter of apology to a few people (mostly his family). If you like Fry; read it. If you are interested in a much more accurate and truthful view of British Boarding schools, with all the buggery and thrashing left in; read it and if you just want to read a really good book after turning your brain to mundane, unimaginative mush by reading Potter. Read it, dammit!