Time to get back on the horse

It is all but three years since I managed to add words to this page so I guess it is time to get back on the horse.

Yesterday was a conference day. A hotel in the depths of the Dumfries and Galloway countryside which was hardly at its most poscardish. One of those horizontal rain lashing dismal clusters of cows days. A room filled with fifty plusses trying to get our collective heads around the idea that blogging, Twitter and e publishing offer us all a brave new dawn. As a person who has never tweeted or read a tweet in my life the morning session was uncomfortably akin to the physics lessons I endured in 1970's Blackburn. No point in being daunted though. Spirit of Dunkirk and all that. Thanks to a daily dose of uber strength cod liver oil pills there are still on or two functioning brain cells showing signs of life so I suppose Twitter should not present a lasting peace in the Middle East type challenge.

I have to admit that the idea that anyone on this earth of ours might want to voluntarily sign on to receive 45 characters of wisdom from yours truly seems somewhat inconceivable, but people at the event seemed to believe it was indeed possible. We'll see. I am hugely sceptical. I suppose the Twitter thing promises to be one of the more interesting learning curves. Some guy on a radio show I podcasted wondered about corporations and Twitter and how on earth that all worked. Apparently the likes of Andrex adorn their packaging with bubbly messages to their customers encouraging us to all 'follow' on Twitter. Follow Andrex. The mind boggles. No place to go on a Sunday morning. It kind of begs the big philosophical question of does toilet roll used by a celebrity become celebrity toilet roll as it heads into the sewers? How can a sheet tweet? Probably the fact that my mind is filled with such shoddy images of a tweeting sheet of Andrex merely rubber stamps the steepness of the Twitter learning curve that lies ahead. Maybe once I work out how to open up a Twitter account and enter their brave new social networking world with the cold determination of a man hell bent on creating myself an 'author's platform' I should follow Andrex before anyone else. And all will be revealed. God forbid.