Last summer when I was staying with my friend India Knight in Cornwall she said I absolutely must join Twitter. Besides being a Sunday Times columnist, she is a Twitter queen, No. 73 in the Top Twit 100, with 57,000 followers. Better still, she has a ‘peer index rating’ — whatever that is — of 58, which is higher than Alan Rusbridger’s, tee hee. I read some of India’s tweets and wasn’t convinced but then she said: ‘Look, Lynn, editors take it seriously. They think if you have 57,000 followers you have 57,000 fans; they see it as proof of popularity.’ ‘But I haven’t got 57,000 followers,’ I whimpered. ‘I haven’t got any.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘I will fix it.’ And so she did — wrote a great fanfare saying at last I’ve persuaded Lynn Barber to join, and blow me, when I came down the next morning, I had several hundred followers! All sending nice messages saying welcome to Twitter. Gosh, wow, fabulous, etc. There remained just one problem. What to tweet? I was having breakfast and thinking of going to the beach. Would that do? Mm, said India. ‘Do you have strong opinions about anything in the news?’ ‘No, never, not from one year to the next.’ ‘Well then,’ said India, ‘Twitter can be very helpful if there’s something you want to know, people will answer any question you fling at them.’ Aha! Blinding light. Something I’ve wanted to know for years. So when India had gone, I tweeted: ‘What is camel toe?’ And lo, about a dozen tweets came zinging back, often with links to photographs of Liz Hurley and her ilk. Camel toe, it seems, is a sort of notch in women’s front bottoms that appears if they wear tight trousers. It
is a brilliant metaphor and whoever invented it should take a bow. Thank you Twitter.
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Twitter was also helpful when I thought I was going to New York and needed to know where I could smoke — I didn’t go but at least now feel I could. It was also great a couple of months ago when there was a bittern on Hampstead Heath for the first time ever, and birders told me exactly where and when (between 5.30 and 5.50 p.m.) it appeared. If it hadn’t been for Twitter I’d have gone at the wrong time, or looked in the wrong place, so for that I am truly grateful.
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Meanwhile, inexplicably — because I never tweeted anything remotely interesting — my band of followers gradually crept up to 3,000. And then it doubled overnight. Why? Because I wrote a disobliging profile of the tennis player Rafael Nadal in the Sunday Times magazine and seemingly every Rafa fan in the world felt moved to tell me they hoped I got cancer. This twitterstorm was unpleasant while it lasted but by the end of the week I had 7,000 followers. And now, after a similar blast from Martin Clunes fans, I have 8,000. I suppose if I tweeted in favour of boiling kittens I could get a million. Which should impress my editor. Shouldn’t it?
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Overheard by my son-in-law in an office near Slough. ‘How do you like your coffee?’ ‘Blonde, two boobs.’
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A few years ago my GP told me my blood pressure was high and I would have to change my lifestyle. I’d have to give up smoking or drinking or… I waited in fear. What could possibly come next? Breathing? ‘Or eating cheese,’ he said eventually. I almost guffawed but managed to look thoughtful and sad. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think it will have to be cheese.’ If only a doctor had given me that dispensation when I was a child, I could have saved myself a lifetime of pretending to like cheese. My husband liked it, all my friends like it, it seems to be a crucial part of middle-class life, and I always suspected it was a sign of my lowly origins that I couldn’t stand the stuff. So it’s been fine these past few years to be able to say mournfully, ‘I’m sorry, I’m not allowed to eat cheese.’ But just the other day I discovered this sweet little object in my grandson’s lunchbox — a squishy triangle wrapped in foil with a picture of a laughing cow on top. Yum yum!
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Here is something Polly Toynbee told me at a party that you might care to ponder. She was banging on about some evil legislation going through the Lords and eventually I said, ‘You know I’m not interested in politics, Polly.’ And she said (not in a friendly way): ‘I always find that when anyone says that, it means they’re really right-wing at heart.’ Does it? I’m not right-wing at heart; if anything, I’m a soppy Sixties leftie. But I assume there’ll be a few right-wing-at-hearters reading this, so what do you say when you meet Polly Toynbee? No answers on a postcard, please. Not even a tweet.
Lynn Barber is a writer and interviewer for the Sunday Times. Her books include the memoir An Education.
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