It won’t be long

Today’s Wednesday Whoo is brought to you with the cheese-heavy chords of Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head which is kind of appropriate for lots of us suffering under the damp conditions we’ve had recently in England and France.

So what brought me joy today? Besides one of my students who sings me her reading and a day that has been brighter and bluer than many of late, mostly I would say Facebook is that thing bringing me joy.

When you are eight years (yes!) into a romance with a social network, you know each other pretty well. You’ve found all the people you wanted to find (one of my good friends Andy from waaaaayyy back in the day was the last piece in my old friends’ collection) and you’ve managed to weed out all the people who added you because they once had your email address from the earliest days of the internet, or you once met them on holiday and shared a cocktail or two, what’s left is a happy bunch of all the people I’ve accumulated over my life, be they friends or family. To see romances and relationships, to see children and grandchildren, to see smiles and weddings, photographs of people’s happiest times, the hundreds of pictures of children and pets, the statuses that make me laugh, the jokes people post, it definitely makes my internet a much nicer place to be.

And, let’s face it, when it comes to the sad times, when you need each other the most, Facebook can be an amazing tool to connect people you can’t be with. I’m not one for text messaging any longer and to be able to have conversations with any number of people when you need to hold each other together – well – that makes life a lot easier.

I am a member of several groups (just about the right number to keep me busy and yet not steal my whole day) and it’s good that when you are trapped in, when it is raining outside, you can always find someone to hang out with, to make you laugh or smile, to have a chat with, it goes a long way to fending off isolation. I can honestly say there is no way I could live out in the sticks without Facebook (or some other social network!) to keep me busy and to keep me sane.

So thank you Facebook. You give me my friends on a daily basis and you make me feel connected even though I might be years and countries away from my friends and family.