Lyin' Eyes

I was thinking again about Facebook, or rather social media in general. As much as many of us love to use the medium to tell the world about when we're happy or sad or hungry, it also gives everyone an insight into the real you. Or often the "you" that you are trying to project, even if it is slightly fast and loose on the facts and detail.

A school friend posted news on Facebook of him starting a new job as headmaster at a school in the west of England. In the midst of the back patting and congratulations, I fell upon a comment from one of his friends saying how much he had liked the photo and biography posted on the school website. Ever the curious one, I thought it was worth a look.

His bio did look pretty impressive. But as I sifted through the many achievements and successes, I felt a little put out by what he had recorded as sporting prowess at school. Oddly my memory serves me very well on the silly little things, and in the seven years we were at school together I'm certain he played no more than twice for a ragtag reserve team (as opposed to the 15-20 times I played each year for the senior teams). As for the rowing, I recall he coxed a couple of times for a junior team but that was it. At the end of the day, maybe it's a petty thing to pick up on. Strictly speaking it wasn't false - semantics and all that. But if you're going to put information like that out there, be ready to defend yourself, Mr L...
 

We Are Family

Life. You get up in the morning, brush your teeth, go to work, come back home, go to bed. So it goes on. Doing a bit of this and doing a bit of that. And through no real fault of your own a year passes you by. Life can be like that. On occasion, you make things happen, but more often than not things just happen to you. And in the process of time whizzing by it’s easy to lose track of "things"; things of substance. And in my case that includes our family spread across three different continents. But this summer, thanks to a little bit of planning, a fistful of air miles and a readiness for jetlag I managed to catch up with virtually all of my immediate family – one mother, two sisters, a brother and 5 out of 6 of the nephews and nieces. Quite a challenge. Social media can be a wonderful thing in terms of staying in touch but it's still only a poor relative to the real thing. It was great - talking to a very chatty teen nephew and niece about the world, no longer espousing their vows of silence; attending my niece's pre-school ballet class; listening as my nephew spoke with conviction about religion and his career situation; talking to my siblings and mother about our respective lives; introducing my partner to my sister and her family for the first time. It's good to reconnect with parts of your existence that matter as it's too easy to get caught up in every distraction under the sun.Hopefully it will happen again sooner rather than later.