Diary

4 July 2009

Susan Hill opens her diary

When I signed up to Facebook certain people jeered. Apparently it was only for the young. Well not any more. Some use it to promote their work, others collect Facebook friends like stamps but never post anything, which seems rather pointless. I have simply made some good friends whose cyber-company I enjoy a couple of times a day. Many of us are writers who work alone and enjoy a social moment with our coffee. And no, Facebook is not just for sad people without any flesh-and-blood friends — its function is different. I have American friends whose posts about their daily lives and opinion, weather, families and localities are endlessly interesting. It has expanded my horizons and introduced me to some delightful people — so, as jockeys say when interviewed after they have won the Grand National, ‘I’d just like to say hello to: Josa, James, Malcolm, Richard, Carol, Philip, Simon, Josie, Jenny, Davina, Eugenie, Victoria, Maureen...’

Yesterday, I saw a hare and its leveret, a deer and its fawn, a rabbit and about a thousand children, a fox and cubs, plus a flycatcher, a buzzard, two painted ladies, and a field ready to be cut for hay and full of poppies, ox-eye daisies, wild mallow, buttercups, cornflowers and more — and all within a quarter of a mile radius of the house. It felt as if we lived in the wilderness, not a long stone’s throw from the village, and seven from the London train. Laudate dominum.