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When I was at junior school it was like this: You hung around with your chum. You did everything together. You copied each other’s homework. You dipped the spare lost property plastic recorder in the disinfectant jar (some posh kids had wooden ones) You Day Traded - ‘one for ones’ with monster munch crisps at break-time. You fought with rulers (my friend John had the greatest weapon a nine year old boy could have – a metal ruler). You discovered bad words together, (some of which you wrote on each other’s pencil cases) picked gravel out of knees, played soccer with tennis balls, knocked conkers out of trees, and compared marks of glory - otherwise known as grass stains. Then, without warning, your pal was quietly whisked away, confiscated like a pea-shooter in the playground or a porno on the back seat of the bus. Maybe his parents moved house. Maybe he couldn’t keep up academically with the other kids, (thank god they never rumbled you!) or maybe he’s still counting to one trillion billion squillion behind that old tree at the far end of the playing field. Either way, he disappeared. Abracadabra. Gone. Back then there were no mobile phones, no email addresses. You didn’t have the technology that kids these days have to keep in touch. One day you were best amigos, Batman and Robin, Danger Mouse and Penfold, Rod Hull and Emu. The next, you were forging new alliances with the cold-hearted calculation of a Columbian drug lord. Or maybe you just had a short memory. Or a new football. And for all intents and purposes you never saw each other again.
UNTIL NOW.

Perhaps you’ve made your stand. Perhaps you’ve declared, “I’m not joining this Facebook thing. Not on your nelly. No way, Jose.” If you have, I admire you. It’s more likely, however, that you’re already trapped, and not even Steve McQueen could escape over the fence on a Triumph 650 motorcycle. Once you’re in there’s no getting out (as they say here in New York’s Little Italy). Facebook is stickier than the quicksand in an old Tarzan movie. It will suck you down, leaving nothing but your hat sitting on the surface; the only sign you’d ever existed in the real world.

I read that Facebook’s (23 year old!) inventor, Mark Zuckerberg, was offered $1 billion for the thing. He rejected the offer. Rumours have it now worth $10 billion. I think young Mark should pack up his Dungeons and Dragons, take the cash and run, whilst he still has legs, before mankind evolves into a race of pale, flat bottomed torsos speaking in ones and zeros and with eyes on the ends of our fingers for sticking firewire leads in the back of computers. Or before Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has us all too busy building fallout shelters to ‘poke’ each other with our cyber finger. (I assume it’s a finger?!)


As I said, once you’re in, you’re in. And it can be wonderful making contact, rediscovering faces, times and places. But it can also be a bit, well, embarrassing. An old friend ‘Facebooked’ me recently. He is a super intelligent, charming guy. But, seeing him again, all be it in the virtual world, reanimated ghosts I had thought exorcised long ago.
All I could think of was the time when we were youngsters and he cycled round to my house to show me his new bike. I fetched my dad’s toolbox and to his surprise (and horror, no doubt) proceeded to take the bike apart, bit by bit, stunt-nut by spoky-doky. (I’ve always been a better deconstructer than constructer). Now, thanks to ‘Facehook’ the sight of my friend WALKING back down that lonely road, laden with pieces of his new bike, is once again etched into my mind. Today a girl FB’d me. The last time I saw was over fifteen years ago when, on one drunken Friday night out, my friends and I threw her in a skip (dumpster for you Americans). I think it was her birthday, or something.

All this goes to prove that I am evil. It also shows that Facebook has a talent for bringing a blush to our faces. It has also driven the last dirty great nail into the coffin of social protocol. You make contact with someone you haven’t heard from for 10 years and before you know it they’re throwing sheep at you, biting chunks out of you, poking you, challenging you to games of Paper, Rock, Scissors, and inviting you to be a Werewolf.

It’s all rather strange and addictive and…well…fun. My favourite application is Scrabulous. I am in New York and currently playing against my brother, who is in the UK. I am losing. As my friend Rob put it, my brother is on a roll and pulling words out of his ass. Priorities have been shuffled. Time no longer has any meaning. Food has lost its appeal and my greatest hope is that the letters
Y O U L U C K Y G I T turn up in my tray soon.