Why The Internet Is Great

Regular readers of this blog will know that I rarely post anything particularly personal. Well, all my posts are personal to me, but I tend not to talk too much about my private life. The weird thing is, I don’t really have a private life. I’m a pretty open person, and I tweet freely (@emmajayorama, if you’re interested). I am friends with my whole family on Facebook, including my parents. I don’t hide anything. I don’t talk about romantic relationships too much, but aside from that my life is an open book.

A few years ago, I ran a competition on this very blog where a reader could win a gift package if they retweeted a link to the blog. The competition was won by a woman called Sian, and she sent me an absolutely lovely email to say thank you. We started following each other on Twitter, and soon realised that we were incredibly similar; not least in terms of our sense of humour. Over the last two years, this Twitter interaction segued into emails and a genuine, solid friendship was formed. The only thing was . . . we had never met!

I know, it’s weird. We have said to each other that we are essentially penpals: modern-day penpals. The digital age, eh? Anyway, a few months back, we started a new blog together based on our mutual bemusement at the interior “design” phenomenon that is twigs in a vase. You might have seen it (check it out here). It started as an in-joke between the two of us, and then became more and more popular with other people sending us photos they had snapped of twigs in vases all over the country. THEY ARE FUCKING EVERYWHERE, SERIOUSLY. This joint blog has made us laugh so, so much and we knew that we had to meet in the flesh. We knew what each other looked like, ate for dinner, listened to on the iPod, etc; yet we had never sat opposite each other in a cafe and laughed and laughed like “normal” friends.

So, after a thwarted night out clubbing, Sian came to visit me on Saturday in my current domicile of Manchester. I live here because my business partner does, and I miss London terribly (which is where Sian lives), but I was looking forward to showing someone round with fresh eyes but mainly just being able to look this amazing woman in the eyes, in the ACTUAL eyes, and tell her how just how much of an ace friend she has been to me.

We joked about photographing every aspect of the day and updating our Twitter feeds so our other mates (some who we’ve met, some who we haven’t) could join in on the inevitable LOLZ but in the end we just talked, and laughed, and ate, and talked, and laughed, and drank, and talked . . . It’s bizarre to think about it, but we basically knew everything about each other already. There was no awkwardness or stilted awkward pauses, it was if we had always known each other (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah).

We did done loads of megalolz fings like get our photo taken in front of a window display of hundreds of mini Twigs In A Vase (TIAV) with the sign I had made for Sian, and the twigs in a vase she had brought for me (which is also what I had planned to get for her but fucking work didn’t leave me enough time, great minds eh?!!), and drank espresso martinis and red wine until she had to get her train back.

The next TIAV AGM will take place very soon . . .

When people take the piss out of things like Twitter I just casually ignore it, because through Twitter I have met some of the most incredible, strong, beautiful, interesting, intelligent, wise and wonderful men and women in the world. Some of them were friends of actual “real-life” friends, some were random people who I started interacting with, some were people I knew a little beforehand but came to know much better through daily conversations. It’s brilliant. It really is. Sian, Steph, Lesley, Lizzie, Sharmila, Vivienne, Sarah, Kimberley, Martin, Nick, Rhodri, Matt, Delia, Chris, Dan . . . the list goes on and on. You are all absolutely MEGA.