Facebook: it’s on, it’s off, it’s on again

Wednesday: A DISILLUSIONED friend decided to leave Facebook today. He announced his departure, via his status, and advised us to be sure to keep his personal email details, as that was how he would be communicating from now on. With that, he was gone. Until six hours later, when up he popped back up again; three hundred and sixty minutes of being out of the loop was all that he could take.

The not-knowing what was going on (FOMO, the Fear Of Missing Out as it has become known) in the immediate lives of his nearest and dearest was eating away at him; Facebook had snared, programmed and conditioned him. Once it had slipped its way beneath his skin, he just couldn't ignore the itch.

There are plenty more like him. Take for example Bolton Wanderers striker, Marvin Sordell, who is so obsessed with social networking via his mobile phone that his manager, Dougie Freedman, has been forced to go public about the problem. Social media guidelines have now been issued to all Bolton Wanderers players, with confiscating their phones being seriously considered as the next step in resolving the issue.

I left Facebook once or twice before, hoping I could resurrect the art of letter writing. It was during a time when all that the postman was slipping through the letterbox were bills and flyers, and I yearned for the days of the late 1990s, pre-mobile phones, when we wrote intimate letters to each other. But then I found, to my shame, that I simply didn't have the time or energy to write lengthy letters anymore. With my tail between my legs, I returned to Zuckerberg’s social media monster. Now, I have learned to enjoy it. For what it is.

As for the friend? He's happy to be back and says he can't see how he will abandon Facebook again – the break-up was too hard to do.

Friday: Since I first discovered him in Drive, I have been enjoying the acting skills of Ryan Gosling. The good woman likes him too, though I'm not sure if our reasons correlate.

Tonight, we rented one of his newer movies, All Good Things, which is an eerie thriller-typed drama based on one of the most famous missing person cases in New York's history. Halfway through the show, something strange happened. Our sitting room door started shaking and rattling fiercely, as if a large lorry or train had just passed the house.

Nothing too unusual you might think, except that we live nowhere near a train station and outside the streets were silent, still and black. We then checked on the young lad and younger lad up in their beds, to see if they had been playing tricks. Deep sleeps owned them both. An unnerved good woman looked to me for an answer. I had none. I said we'll worry about it if it happens again.

Saturday: There was a report in today's paper about calls for all dogs in the Republic of Ireland to be microchipped, after a series of vicious attacks on sheep around the country. A dog trainer I know tells me that a responsible owner will get it done as they are terrified of losing their pet and though there are complaints about expense, it only costs in the region of a few packets of cigarettes. He feels the positives far outweigh the negatives and speaking from a parent’s perspective, any move to eradicate sparring strays, excrement on pavements and the savage attacks on livestock must be welcomed.

Staying with microchipping, a man I know told me that his wife was considering having a microchip installed in him that would beep every time he was in the pub and he’d reached his ideal fill of drink.

He told her to arrange to have the procedure done, as long as she could live with a beeping in her ears morning, noon and night.