There is something disappearing. Something that is decreasing at a trouser shittingly alarming rate. Covering an area that dwarfs the desecration of the worlds' rain forests and is at a red alert level risk of becoming extinct sooner than any Polar Bear or Panda. A global catastrophe in the waiting and it is man at the helm and yet man who will suffer when this weary wordy ship finally hits the jagged rocks of social meltdown.
The Catch Up: The quintessentially civilised beginning of any conversation in which one has not seen another for a measured period of time, be it a week, month or year, is rapidly vanishing from our everyday conversations.
Remember the times when you'd arrive for the Easter holidays at your cousins' house and those awkward stilted first moments where you could only talk about your journey there, which was unfortunately void of any danger or excitement of any kind, so you would would sometimes have to elaborate on a hairy moment near the Milton Keynes bypass, until you were suddenly and magically transported into the familiar living room of normal relaxed conversation with people you knew perfectly well and wondered how or why you ever had to have these strange little epilogues every time you met, similar to each time you'd go ice skating after getting rather good the last time, only to find yourself back at square one, scrambling round the ice like a Chuckle Brother on mescaline.
In the following dialogues proceeding that oddity of Englishness, one would normally set about talking to everyone about what they've been up to since last they met. Holidays, Birthdays, Deaths, marriages, happy news, sad news, new arrivals, new acquisitions and so on but these small introductory news bulletins are in serious jeopardy due to the multitude of modern day communication networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, Blogs and other assorted interweb interfaces.
These growing behemoths of chattering tit bit are crushing the possibility of having anything new to learn of someone what so ever that hasn't already been divulged in a news flash style communiqué of some sort, trespassing onto your computer like an Ebola virus attacking your immune system.
Those ingenious programmes and systems that were no doubt designed to bridge the gap in global communication are now being used for such menial and pathetic situations and tasks that it probably has the staggeringly rich cyber boffin inventors crying into their Sim avatar's digital porridge.
In this age of celebrity pointlessness these things have managed to persuade the everyman and woman that if a star can be born from nowhere on such programmes as Big Brother, X Factor and the multitude of 'Fly on the Wall' docu-dramas then they too should be transcribing the chronicles of their every thought and wim to the entire planet.
Resulting in people using space bound technology to make sure that the whole pissing galaxy knows that they're 'having Pasta for tea' or that a man on the bus is 'wearing a funny hat' or that you're on the fucking holiday you told everybody you were going on ample times before you left just to make sure they don't send such titillating information as Wagner's possible departure from X factor or that your mate Tommo just followed through in the cab home from Wagamamas as you couldn't carry on filling your face with over priced Paella if you missed out on that life changing info-fucking-mation.
I am now so fully informed of everybody's whereabouts and daily shenanigans that i meet friends out on a Friday night after work and sit in absolute silence until someone pipes up with someone else's news that they've recently read to which the writer of which can only simply acknowledge with a “yeeeaah!” and retort with a similarly quoted piece of recent gossip which everybody in earshot already knows 'cause they fucking read it already too!!
I'm now surrounded by iPhone obsessed drones that look like they've lost all the muscles on the back of their neck who peruse the inner world as they ignore the outer one, begrudgingly bowing to the small glowing once bitten Apple god like a drugged up Mooney cult and the only people that aren't subscribing to this geek revolution are outside polluting their outlaw rebel lungs with cancer sticks probably swapping actual stories of things that actually happened to real people that they didn't put on fucking Twitter earlier that day!
I'm thinking of starting up my own site called “Twatter” and what it cleverly does is tweets anybody who Twitters anything saying “Nobody cares what you're doing you egotistical delusional Fuckwit! Get on with your silly little inconsequential life and stop bothering us!”
Then maybe one day soon on a hopeful, brighter day, people will be skipping through the parks laughing, gayly swinging round lamp-posts, singing of the joys of spring, cigerettes will be proved to be vital to good health and bans will be lifted to the sound of triumphant trumpets and iPhones will be made illegal after being proven that they turn you into a unsociable 24 carat cunt and i will finally be able to sit in a pub filled with smoke, drinking my pint out of a straight forward non branded pint glass and chat the kind of shit i'm now driven to only writing down to my attentive friends who are filled to the brim with all their news and gossip, unheard, unspoken, unwritten, un fucking facebooked until it all goes deathly quiet....
...and then we'll all start talking about how we miss it all! Arse.
