Morning:
14°c
To Twitter or not to Twitter? I joined "this new social networking utility for staying connected in realtime" a few weeks ago and I now regret it.
Being a technological ingénu, I hadn't realised what I'd let myself in for. Every few hours an email lands in my in-box saying x or y or z is following me on Twitter. Of course, I have no idea who they are. Is this utility to give people the illusion of popularity? It doesn't make me feel wanted but instantly oppressed. It's social harassment.
As for those who write messages for the world to see, it is the ultimate form of narcissism. No wonder Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand have joined the Twitter bandwagon. When these two are on board, it's time to hop off.
Stephen Fry made no fewer than seven updates to his Twitter site yesterday. Ran one: "One scene down. Five to go. Morale high. Too many cakes available. Mustn't weaken. Mustn't weaken. Mustn't weaken. Musn't weak.....gaaaargh." To think he is one of the more literate Twitterers out there.
Twitter is just an illiterate Facebook and it is further demeaning the English language for the sake of instant communication. What's wrong with old-fashioned email?
Or the best form of instant communication - face-to-face talk?
Come back, Stephen, before it's too late. Let him eat cake, if only to stop him Twittering.
* Yes she can. This Monday I went to the annual Hugh Cudlipp Lecture at the London College of Communication to hear the famously reticent Sun editor Rebekah Wade give her first public speech in nine years. I was dreading it, fearing Wade was going to offer us a navel-gazing panegyric about the wonders of tabloid journalism. In the event I was bowled over. It was reported she'd rehearsed it for hours on end. She needn't have bothered: she was much better at making off-the-cuff remarks than reading from the autocue. It's high time Rupert Murdoch let her go on Question Time.
* LOOKING back on the life of John Updike, his Rabbit quartet was undeniably a major landmark in modern literature. It wasn't just about the life of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, it was the story of 20th- century America. Once I embarked on the tetralogy, I knew I just had to finish it (sorry, Lawrence Durrell, I still can't complete your Alexandria Quartet). The margins of my Rabbit books are marked with innumerable ticks, testimony to his felicities of phrase and verbal exuberance. And few writers have written so well (and so rhythmically) about sex. My favourite line? "Women, fire in their crotch, won't burn out, begin by fighting off pricks, end by going wild hunting for one that still works." Updike's crotch still burns bright and will do so for years to come.
