Farewell, Facebook

14st 13lb, 4.4 units. I did two uncharacteristically grown-up things today. First I rang my bank manager and arranged a sizeable overdraft facility, for the first time in many years, so that I would have some means of paying for Mrs H’s new car. On the strength of this I drove around to our unfriendly local Audi dealer and dropped off the cheque that they insisted on having a full week in advance of handing over the vehicle. I thought fondly of how every garage I have ever dealt with in the North East has been content to accept a personal cheque immediately before I drove off in my new car, though admittedly they do have the advantage of knowing who I am and where I live.

Secondly, and more importantly, I found out how to remove myself from Facebook. I had worked out that this must be possible mainly from the fact that the number of “Friends” noted on my “Profile” kept going down, and this proved to be because they no longer existed in Facebookland rather than because they had quite reasonably decided that keeping in touch with me was both futile and depressing. The last straws were noticing that one of my so-called “Friends” had yet again deleted my witty (as I thought) contribution to one of their “threads” rather than bothering to reply to it, and receiving a long lecture from one of Mrs H’s friends about how I needed to put my wife and child first when considering my preferences on housing. A fair point, but I don’t particularly want to read it on a “social networking site”. And in truth the majority of my “Friends” were really friends of Mrs H, who is a much more appropriate age for this sort of thing, but quite rightly refuses to squander her own precious time by joining it.

Having eliminated one major time-wasting activity from my life at a stroke, I seriously considered getting rid of an even bigger one by deleting this blog, but Mrs H successfully pleaded with me not to do so. After all, it did bring us together and she is probably the only person in the world who regularly laughs aloud while reading it, so I concluded that the least I could do (always what I aim for) was to accede to her request.