I've left Facebook, despite my 243 friends. The danger is I'll end up with more the last thing I need is 244 friends. One woman on my list has 600. I have not met six hundred people in my life. Another person, I've never met, has 2,500; surely a sign of attention deficit syndrome.

Facebook is all about showing off: here's me digging out organic potatoes in Auroville, eating snow in Switzerland and in a jeep in the Himalayas; here's me in some fantastically beautiful location, up a creek, in a yacht, being abducted by terrorists. What are you up to? Sitting by your silly computer and wishing you had a life. My computer is only used to transfer images. I don't even have time for Facebook.

Of all my friends, there's only one I really want to meetu00a0 Jim. We used to go cycling together in the park before school. But we haven't met and it's been a couple of years. Instead someone leaves a comment on my wall (if you don't use Facebook, we write on each other's walls). It says: "I woke up" or "I lost my keys." And I respond: "Good morning!" or "I hope you find your keys."



I will then wake up, in the middle of the night, to delete this comment, wondering why I responded to a mundane statement with a mundane statement.u00a0

Once, in response to someone who posted "Eating apple pie, mmm", I wrote, 'Wow.' Notice the present continuous tense not content with eating the pie, the person felt the need to report its progress 'down my throat where it will be met by my digestive system extracting what nutrition there is and discarding the rest.'

Then I asked myself the dreaded question, "When was the last time you read a book?" It's been quite a while. My key cultural consumption is YouTube if you can't upload it, no use to me. Someone posts a link, it takes me to a Malaysian student's dorm in New York.

Everything is tidy, no beer cans, no ashtray, exercise books in a neat pile, trainers, neatly by the door. The only sign of debauchery is a copy of Bill Clinton's autobiography, My Life. He points the camera to the face that I'd really rather not be in the room with, then he points to toilet rolls he's bought and says they're 'very smooth'.

Next thing I find myself watching a video of Michael Jackson in London to announce his June gigs earlier this year. "That's not him," screams one user. "That's an imposter." You may not know it, but debate rages online about whether Michael Jackson is a) dead b) Beyonce or c) Barack Obama. A sample of Jackson's sperm, I learn, has been shipped to London to avoid any legal claims on it by deranged individuals. I imagine Paul McCartney singing, "The sperm is mine, the doggone sperm is mine."



Then I come across this comment: "I honestly believe that man (Michael Jackson) may have been behind 9/11. As odd as it sounds, Dangerous takes on new meaning when you think about it. Notice that no one can account for where he was on that day. His schedule for 2001 has been posted online but 9/10 and 9/11 are strangely absent... Coincidence?"

I rush to deactivate my Facebook account. Enough is enough. A message pops up on the lines of: "Are you sure you don't want to see Minny, Jack and Jo again?" To which I want to respond: "I never knew them in the first place."

Facebook then invites me to click on why I'm leaving (one reason is 'I don't know how to use Facebook'). If your reason is not there, then you have to tick 'other' and then give a
reason.

Then you have to type what's in the boxu00a0 distorted numbers and lettersu00a0before it allows you to go. And even then, you are not totally deactivatedu00a0 your information, your friends, are all kindly stored. All you have to do to get back on is do what you always do, email, password, you're in. Even when you are dead, you can log on. Naturally, I'll be back tomorrow. I want to meet Jim.

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