Facebook passed me by

I had just started my day's allotted task of tidying up the herbaceous section, having equipped myself with a pink bucket and the only pair of work secateurs available for staff use, and was staring at Acanthus mollis, the first plant in the herbaceous alphabet, when the boss hailed me through the gate into the garden.  He told me the latest on the bees his friendly local bee farmer keeps on the estate, and suggested we go and have a look at the bait hives the bee farmer had put in the garden, to see if any bees had moved in yet.  They were only installed yesterday, and one had so much activity round the door we thought a swarm must already have taken up residence.  Bees in lesser numbers were crawling around the entrance of the second empty hive, which we thought were probably scouts at this stage, sent out by a swarm to find it a good permanent home.  Then we went to admire a rather ordinary and badly leaning conifer which has been transformed into a frothy tower of beauty at this time of the year by growing a white flowered wisteria up it.  This was Wisteria venusta, which has comparatively short racemes of individually quite large flowers, and the boss was very proud of the effect, and the way that the wisteria had turned a dull tree into something special.  The flowers had a pleasant scent, not as potent as W. sinensis, but sweet, and with a hint of the bean field about it, and the whole plant was humming with foraging bees.  I quoted W B Yeats to the boss, about the bee loud glade, and returned to Acanthus.

It was a pleasant day, warmer than days of late, which put all the customers in a good mood, and there were some familiar faces among the throng, including the couple around my age who once popped up at a lecture about local architect Raymond Erith, on which basis I feel they must be civilised people to know, besides which, they have kind faces.  I was rather taken aback in the afternoon by a man who appeared to have a dead squirrel hanging from his chin, but on closer view it was a straggly goatee beard, tied tightly just below his jaw with a rubber band.  I cannot think of any circumstances in which that would not be a seriously bad look.

While tidying the herbaceous section, in between stints on the till, I mused about the Facebook flotation.  I am not and have never been on Facebook.  When it first appeared it was for young people, and then London based journalists began to write about it, and I thought it was for metropolitan media types who were trying to be trendy, but still irrelevant to me, and then I began to not like the sound of it anyway.  Everything I heard about the opacity of the privacy settings put me off, knowing that I would never get those right.  Besides which, I couldn't think of anything much I needed to communicate via Facebook, and I couldn't think of many people I'd communicate it with.

I don't need to post status updates.  I have been married to the same person for 27 years, living at the same address for 18 and doing the same job for 8.  If any of those facets of my status suddenly change it will be a sufficiently momentous fact that I'd rather tell my friends and relations about it personally.  Facebook is supposed to be good for sharing photos, but I don't want to share photos.  I don't even have any photos to share, finding that the act of walking around photographing life is detrimental to the act of actually living it.  If I had any photos I can't see why people I know would want to look at them.  Pre-internet, making other people look at your holiday snaps was considered pretty naff, and I don't see that it would get less self-indulgent just because it happened on an on-line forum.  Much as I love the company of my friends, I don't feel any great need to look regularly at their photos either.

Anyway, I don't think most of my friends are on Facebook.  Some who have children may be on it in a low key way to stay in touch with their kids, but they have never suggested to me that I might like to join them there.  A good half of my friends don't even like computers very much.  I mean, they're not phobic.  They'll use Google when they have to, to check out museums and galleries and gardens and things, but they don't spend their spare time surfing the net as a leisure pursuit.  And I can't see the attraction of amassing great long lists of Facebook 'friends'.  And I find the whole idea of formalising social relationships in that way deeply bizarre.  Asking somebody to be my 'friend'?  'Unfriending' them if we've had a falling out or things have gone a bit cool?  It sounds like the language of the playground, not the nuanced relationships of adult human beings.

Apart from that, I don't really know what happens on Facebook, because I have never been there.  The only reason I can think of why I would join would be if it becomes ubiquitous among the sort of middle-aged people I hang out with for organising events.  If the Colchester beekeepers switched from using e-mail to using Facebook to announce details of club meetings, for example, then it would be unreasonable of me to refuse to use Facebook, and insist that I had to be different, and get my own special e-mail, or phone call, or letter, or message carried by runner in a cleft stick.  Until that day I'll steer clear of it.  I'm pretty sure that the flotation is insanely overpriced, though.