Kelly Rose Bradford: Tweeting away the hours

Feb 10 2009

I have a new displacement activity and time wasting device. Obviously it is internet based.

Not content with sending endless emails all day long, chatting via Facebook and visiting various forums, I am now also signed up to Twitter and am now "tweeting" away the hours.

What's more, I am in good company, with the likes of Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross also detailing the minutiae of their lives through daily Tweets.

And of course the only topic that dominated Twitter last week was snow. Every couple of minutes there would be new weather-related updates from my Twittering chums.

I'm not entirely sure what the point of Twitter is - a fact that only came to light when someone asked me to explain it to them. Phrases like micro-blogging not actually meaning very much at all to most people.

But whatever it's point is, it is fun, and a good way of sharing information rapidly, even if it is only a detailed account of what you are having for your breakfast. Or how far up your wellies your local snowfall is.

And as I spent most of last week in a housebound state because of said weather, it provided a most welcome distraction and means of communication with the outside world.

Boy was off school for two days, which meant hastily rearranging work schedules and childcare to enable him to spend 48 hours frolicking in snowdrifts and making various snow people, igloos and snowballs the size of space hoppers.

'Please do be careful', 'do not throw that' and 'do not bring snow indoors' all going ignored in his excitement and haste to enjoy every last moment of it, while mummy watched from the window variously wondering how we as a country would cope in a real state of emergency, and noting via Twitter my disdain that everything had ground to a halt due to a bit of bad weather.

Is it really that much of a surprise that we have some snowfall in the middle of winter?

Am I wrong in thinking that if a five-year-old can charge up and down the road with no adverse effects, build a habitable snow structure, several 5ft tall snowmen and clear the garden of snow in 10 minutes by rolling it all into an enormous ball, surely it is not too much to ask for our trains to be running, buses to be operational and schools to be open?

If we'd had constant snow for a month, would we have remained in the quiet, eerie, almost comatose state the local area was in at the start of the week?

Obviously, the effect on me personally was minimal: I sat in my nice snug home office, watched my son playing happily from the window and moaned about how dreadful it all was on Twitter. Which perhaps is the whole point of micro blogging after all.