I prefer the Irish goodbye to a club to the public flounce from social media

Belatedly, I’d like to formally announce that I have left the Bay City Rollers fan club. I don’t think it was them though, since it was nearly 50 years ago, I can’t honestly swear it wasn’t me either. My best recollection now is that the membership renewal bill coincided with my childish head being turned by, I’m going to say, Flintlock.

I can also confirm that’s I’m now no longer a member of the Juvenile Pioneer Total Abstinence Association (‘no sh**, Sherlock’ — the rest of the world.) I can’t remember now if my membership expired automatically when I reached a certain age or if there was some quiet drumming out ceremony in my absence the first time I hiccupped my way into Mary’s disco, but truth to tell, either I had stopped going to the Wednesday evening meetings or they’d stopped mustering several years before.

Much, much later, I did question the sense of achievement of a bunch of 10-year-olds coming together in the school hall weekly to watch Civil Defence films about nuclear annihilation and congratulate ourselves on staying sober, but sure look. It was a club and, for a few years, they had me as a member.

I’m also no longer affiliated with the Irish Council Against Blood Sports. Now that sundering, I remember more clearly. I had joined the organisation because of my disgust over hare coursing and, rightly or wrongly, left it because I was spending a lot of time in my father’s home town where my late uncle had been Master of the Hounds for the local fox hunt. I wasn’t in favour of fox hunting, but it just felt like a bit of a double standard and also, like the Bay City Rollers fan club before it, my membership fees were due and I had other plans for them (coincidentally, also linked to my leaving the Pioneers.)

I left the two Shamrock Rovers fan clubs of which I was a member when I moved to the UK and had babies and couldn’t really justify double fees to follow a football team in a different country. I kind of regret that now, truth be told. When my great friend Robbie, tangled up in the green and white of both of those clubs, phoned me in London to ask for a financial contribution towards a new, even bigger flag, I declined, telling him I was saving for a mortgage. ‘That says it all,’ he cheerfully observed, ‘you’re saving up for a house, I’m saving up for a flag.’

There may have been other clubs that I can’t now recall, and if so, I apologise for the oversight in my failure to formally announce I had left them at the time.

To be honest, it was only when people started loudly fleeing Twitter than I realised that I was guilty of several breaches in etiquette by not documenting my departure from these associations at the time. As to that blighted social media platform, I have not left it, nor now do I look at it very much. But rest assured I shall keep you informed if that position changes.

I will admit that I used to enjoy when regular Twitter users — of whom I used to be one — would announce in high dudgeon that they were no longer having fun on the platform and were deleting their profile. I enjoyed it even more when they almost inevitably returned, but without any of the trumpeting fanfare of their departure. Don’t get me wrong: I’m talking about friends and good people, many of whom I’m genuinely fond. I’ve just never really understood why a virtual club had such a profound effect on its members that they felt obliged to publicly declare to the world the end of their affair, even when they clearly didn’t mean it.

Anyway, there’s been a particularly loud exodus (somewhat ironically, if you know your Old Testament) from Twitter, or X, or whatever it’s calling itself today, in the weeks since the escalation of hostilities in the Middle East.

Again, it’s largely good people leaving and again, I don’t disagree with any of their reasons. I’m just a bit baffled by why it has to be so publicly and stridently stated that you’ve had enough of a social media platform that used to operate like an agreeable workplace kitchen but clearly went off the boil years ago.

I don’t remember reading a dozen newspaper columns on people leaving Bebo or Club Penguin. Though come to think of it, given how frequently The Boy used to ‘borrow’ my email, I may still be a member of Club Penguin.

For God’s sake, don’t anyone move until I check.