Saturday 4 November 2017

#302 Microblogging

If I shortened my posts by about 30%, I'd be microblogging. It hasn't happened because I have no idea how to tell a story in two or three paragraphs but if I ever figure that out, I might try it. Probably not here. Maybe on Facebook.

I'm curious as to whether anyone blogs on Twitter. You can fit 250 words into a Twitter image at font size 12. That's 1,300 characters compared to Twitter's normal limit of 140. It's a strange place to blog but somebody must have tried it. I'd love to shake their hand and give them a biscuit.

My antipodean ex-housemate Naomi put up a 73 word post today. In a way it wasn't really a blog post. The first three words were "sorry" as she hadn't written in ages but she packed a surprising amount of content into the three lines.

We learned that Naomi had been working hard, seeing friends, spending time with a man friend (!), working out and swimming. That's a ton of stuff. Her dinky little post told me pretty much everything that her usual posts do but in less detail. It was like the Scotch pancake of blog posts.

I love Scotch pancakes. I think my fondness of them began when my parents started getting lazy and shoved a couple of buttered pancakes into my lunchbox instead of sandwiches. I was the first kid in the whole school to finish my lunch and having crammed them down my throat in ten seconds, the dinner ladies (as they used to be called) would have no choice but to let me out to play. Of course, there was nobody else in the playground yet but I still welcomed the additional free time.

2 comments

Fizzfan said...

I’m sure your blog would be great however long it was;)

I’ll be honest I don’t know what Scotch pancakes are but I liked the image of you stuffing them down so you could be released into the wilds of your playground, even if it was just to go play with yourself. (Apologies, that kind of wrote itself)

My top memory of primary school lunches was lumpy mash, vomit inducing semolina, pickled beetroot with fish every Friday (YUM) and Mark Cornwall thinking he could get away with not eating his chocolate pudding by hiding it on the floor.
All pretty grim, but good old fashioned character building stuff!

I’m pretty sure lunch boxes hadn’t even been invented then.



Profound Familiarity said...

They're pancakes that are about three quarters of a centimetre thick and the size of a beermat. You can buy them in the supermarket in packs of six.

I've never liked the look of semolina.