When I first met my wife, I was a daily blogger. I wrote many entries over the time we were first dating, some of which obliquely referenced things that involved her.

At some point, as a well-intentioned gift, which she received in the spirit it was intended, I collected a lot of entries from the blog into a single document, footnoted the whole thing with more information about what I wasn't mentioning in the posts, and printed it in the form of a book for her. As she was never normally seen without a book about her person, this was possibly a thoughtful gift.

Or maybe a narcissistic one.

The jury's still out. In fairness, she re-read the book in recent weeks and is still talking to me, so I remain optimistic.

The thing is that this is a place where I can chronicle my own mental decline... because it is that, isn't it? I started writing around 19 years ago as a rather snarky 27 year old. Three years later, single, trying to be a comedian, I was blogging about buying toasters.

Then there was a golden age of writing about gigs and doing young-person things like being out all week...

Now, I'm stuck at home during a pandemic with a house that smells of slow-roasted meat and an increasing number of cats.

Not being out there gigging is slowly driving me nuts. My kids think I'm funny, which is great, and I am making up silly songs and doing silly voices, but it's not the same. The problem is that I don't have a place to channel the sort of reactions I get to people being utterly insane, or self-serving, or pointless. Comedy is the outlet for cleansing oneself of the ridiculousness of the world.

If there's a place I shouldn't go when I'm feeling antsy about the people with whom I cohabit this world, it's Facebook... not just Facebook, but the local Faceboook group.

Often, I can keep my reactions under control. Today I didn't...

Faced with this:

... and let's just unpack this - she's got some rubbish and she wants to see if she can solve that with Facebook, rather than a bin...

... I posted the following reply:

It's not exactly vicious... but it's a good way to waste the time of someone who's wasting everyone's time.

The silly thing is, that she did as I asked:

The names of the innocent have not been quoted.

I'm fucking losing it. I really am. Between the pointlessness of the above, the ridiculously vapid posts filling LinkedIn, and the fact that the world has split into people who think we should lock down more and people who think that fatties should just stay indoors so they can have a virus party in the real world, the whole limited universe I experience through my various screens has gone bonkers.

So if I want to look at the underside of someone's garbage on Facebook, then I reckon that's a healthy way forward.