I have tried Twitter for a week and I have decided that it is not really my cup of tea, I just can’t understand hash tagging and all that business. Maybe I have got to that time of life when technology catches up with me, waves as it overtakes, then disappears over the horizon, because I just don’t get it at all. I have twenty seven followers which are made up of a few friends, some people my friend Craig attached to me because he felt sorry for me and some American investment sales people who want to make my life better overnight. No one has ever replied to my attempted tweets, which if I am honest, have been lacking any great wit because I have found the whole bloody thing so uninspiring.

When I decided to have a go at Twitter I thought the best option was to begin by following subjects that interested me, so I began following subjects that I take interest in such as BBC news, sport and weather, Reading FC, Question Time and Stephen Fry. I chose Stephen Fry not because I like or dislike him particularly (apart from as the excellent General Melchit in Blackadder) but because he is supposedly the great wit of Twitter and I would be deeply moved by his inspiring twits, or tweets, or whatever they are called. It turns out that the big blubbering fool is on there purely to recite every movement of his life. On Thursday he twitted “I just live this hotel. “Spotting this mistake I quickly twitted back “Live or Love Mr Fry?” to which he retwitted “I just LOVE this hotel.” My temporary joy at having been personally twitted by the King of twits was quickly dampened by my children informing that Fry had 2.5 million followers and that perhaps it wouldn’t have just been me who had spotted his spelling error.

Recovering from this setback to my ego I persevered with my agenda to get in to twittering by trying to watch Question Time whilst tweeting. Bugger me what a carry on that was. Every time Dimbleby or an audience member asked a question to the panel it would ping up on my screen about fifteen seconds later as an open tweet inviting responses. By the time I had answered a tweet about British arms dealers having the blood of Libyan civilians on their hands, Janet Street-Porter was talking child poverty in Wales and by the time I had found out how the subject had gone from Libya to Wales, Shirley Williams was talking about old people getting abandoned in hospitals. Rather than having my finger bang on the pulse of modern technology I was falling behind at such a rate that if I had carried on I would have been tweeting my thoughts on “The Big Society” with matchsticks keeping my eyes open as Carol Kirkwood presented weather on BBC Breakfast Time.

Talking of Carol Kirkwood, my youngest son tweeted her saying “Hello Carol are you God?” which to his delight she replied personally with “No, but I wish I was.” When I questioned him why he had asked a weather forecaster such an irrelevant and quite frankly, idiotic question, he explained that the more bizarre the tweet the more likely you are to get a response. In this case my son was playing the part of a psychopath, so if you are reading this Carol, don’t be alarmed, my son is basically a good boy and he won’t harm you, he just has a daft sense of mischief. When you think about it, having a Twitter account must leave the rich and famous vulnerable to all sorts of abuse, though I suppose it must be well policed otherwise there wouldn’t be so many using it as it would be a stalkers dream come true.

My kids love Twitter, they say it’s miles better than Facebook, but my experiences of it so far are that it’s just a place where the rich and famous can tell you how great their lives are without paying any attention to your comments, it is like having a one way conversation with someone only interested in what they have to say. I followed Michael Vaughan (former England cricket captain) for a while and had to stop because I started to resent his apparently care free life of safari trips, great meals out and games of golf at five star hotel complexes. I have always liked Michael Vaughan, now I was beginning to hate the bastard for no other reason than his life being so much more exciting than mine. I am sure in reality, Vaughan is a decent bloke, I just don’t want to read about his wonderful life as I watch the rain cascading down my kitchen window.

Despite all this, I will probably stick with Twitter rather than deleting it, but unless you are in a job where you can sit there with the screen on all the time as tweets feed through, I don’t get the point of it really, maybe I will learn to love it. I have just had a quick look and I see that that Stephen Fry has added his latest hilarious Tweet. Can you guess what this man of  razor wit and high intellect has written?

“Lordy Lord”

Yes, that’s it, his tweet of the afternoon is “Lordy Lord.”

Stephen Fry’s untamed Oxbridge humour knows no boundaries.