I’m clearly not coping with modern day life as well as I should be. I have joined? entered? gone on? Facebook in the last month. A friend who moved to Ireland sent an email reporting her new and very exciting engagement - and said she’d posted photos on Facebook. To see them I had to join up. Since then I have had numerous invites to be someone’s friend, write on someone’s wall, poke someone, send them a smile…. Some of the people whose Facebook friend I now am are real friends, some from my everyday life, others (like Suburban Mum) people who were in my everyday life and then moved away. some old and dear friends whom I speak to too infrequently. If I could get my head around the concept of walls and comparing movie tastes with people then these are the sort of people that I would want to communicate with.

But I am receiving random requests from people I knew at Uni. People I last saw over 10 years ago or people who have my address, phone number and email address and have never shown the least inclination to contact me. People whom I sporadically contact by email and who reply once from politeness and then not again for months and months. I can’t get my head around why they want to be my Facebook friend. Is there kudos in increasing the number of friends one has?

In reality I just can’t get my head around Facebook. I go on occasionally and look at pages set up for my friends and it seems to tell me nothing other than the fact that they’ve been poked or whammied or kissed or sometimes there’s a single sentence saying they’re about to drink a glass of wine. And I just don’t get it. Maybe I’m just too old-fashioned. Or too slow….