So we’ve just emerged from The Best July in the World Ever. Royal babies waving, Scottish tennis players smiling, and, best of all, a heatwave which sent the entire country hurtling into meltdown and (so it seemed to me one Friday) the train to Brighton.
I’ve had friends over from Australia. How I’ve enjoyed fooling them that they gave up their friends, families and exponential growth in property value for nothing. And the novelty of a school sports day when it didn’t rain was a joy to behold. Not to mention the exclusively British pleasure of waking up in a good mood just because the sun’s shining.
But there has been one casualty of this early start to the summer holidays, and that is the state of my Facebook timeline.
Gone are the witty observations on my friends’ humdrum lives. Gone are the links to interesting news articles. Gone are the requests to sign petitions to save the honey bee. And the videos of dogs on skateboards. All the stuff I love has been replaced by a seemingly endless stream of holiday photos.
We’ve got children jumping in the air, sitting on the beach, sitting on the beach with a hat on, jumping in the air with a hat on, sitting on the beach with their parents (with or without hats on). You get the idea.
Am I the only one who remembers that the couples who invited their friends over to ‘entertain’ them with a slideshow of their holiday snaps used to be highly ridiculed? It was a practice anyone with any style abandoned at the end of the seventies along with platform shoes and the Ford Cortina. So, at which point did it once more become acceptable to bore your friends to death with your holiday photos?
Digital technology has now given us the freedom to take as many pictures as we fancy. We can shoot the same subject from a dozen different angles. We can enhance, zoom in, rotate, and frame it on Pinterest. We can make ourselves better looking, or wash ourselves in sepia so we look like Victorians (why?). This is all great fun and I’m all for it. But it doesn’t mean I want to sit through it, over and over again.
Well not unless Facebook is going to start providing me with a small Babycham and a bowl of cheese footballs to munch on while I watch.
Helena Beard is managing director of KBC PR & Marketing, a PR, representation and marketing agencies specialising in travel and tourism.
