Babergh has started to twitter!
I had read about twittering on a number of websites and blogs, but had thought that the new fad was largely the territory of adolescents who spend all their time communicating with one another, and doing little else. But no! Yesterday councillors received a communication from Paul Simon, the Head of Communications at the Council, telling us that we could now find out what Babergh is doing from its ‘tweets’ on the Twitter website.
Nothing daunted I opened a Twitter account (easy), and then tried to puzzle out what was going on on the site (not immediately very easy). I found that I was already ‘following’ a rather strange assortment of individuals and organisations, including various minor celebrities, a soft drink company and Number 10 Downing Street. I was able to see messages from all these people telling me what they were doing, which ranged from the bizarre to the incomprehensible. The comments from No 10 Downing Street were particularly obscure until I remembered that Gordon Brown is in Rome at present, and the ‘tweets’ (which I assume are actually posted by some acolyte) related to the Pope.
Within moments of logging on I received the message that Number Ten and the soft drinks company were now ‘following' me. Goodness me! Talk about Big Brother! I don’t much want to be ‘followed’ by Gordon Brown, but to date I haven’t found how to turn him, or the drinks company, off. In any event I don’t think Gordon will be very interested in the lamb hotpot that I cooked yesterday evening, or in the fact that I was off to bed at 10 p.m. with a cup of cocoa and a copy of Twelfth Night.
Having started however I thought I had better finish. I found Babergh on the Twitter site and requested that I might become ‘a follower’. Lo and behold, when I logged on to the site this morning (to tell Gordon and my other ‘followers’ that I was just off to Sainsbury’s) a message was there telling me that Babergh has decided to give money to Sudbury Citizens Advice for outreach work. This is of course excellent news, but time will tell whether this new sort of electronic message board really works for me, or for Babergh.
In case you're interested, I'm now off to cook supper again. It's pork belly with apples this evening!
