Of all the timelines in all the Twitterverse, he walks into mine…

Day 13: Intermezzo - a brief romantic interlude.

General status update:

Hair: no change

Nausea Demon: Quiet, as he’s busy finalising his choice of Open University course – he’s narrowed it down to either a Diploma in Counselling or a course in ‘Health and Social Care’.  Go figure.

Chemo Muse: channelling her Inner Whirling Dervish. It’s frightening.

Heightened sense of smell: red wine, one of my favourite things in the world, now smells like vinegar. I no longer have any desire to drink it. This makes me want to weep.

Skin: Getting very dry, and a bit sore. By the time the sixth dose of chemo comes around, I will have completed my metamorphosis  into a Komodo Dragon Giant Lizard. Eat your heart out, Franz Kafka.

Anxiety (0-10): Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil - and that is all down to Lorazepam, the Lord’s Own high-potency, 3-hydroxy benzodiazepine drug.

State of mind: On standby. Please don't pull the plug out from the wall.
 

 Once upon a time or, more precisely, one bright summer’s morning in July 2010, a woman called Betty was finding ways not to do the thing that she knew she ought to be doing, which was writing. Betty (who lived by the English seaside in a town called Whitstable, famous for oysters)

had a contract with a publisher, and an overdue deadline, and she needed to concentrate on finishing the chapter she was writing, in the worst possible way. So, not unsurprisingly, she was playing Spider Solitaire and letting herself be distracted by Twitter.

At exactly the same moment two other people, one in a recently restored old camel barn on the north Aegean coast of Turkey....

 the other in an office in a university in London,

 were doing much the same thing: namely, anything at all to avoid applying themselves to the task before them that urgently needed doing. 

At 11.43 am Betty realised how much of the morning she had wasted, and observed sadly to the Twitterverse:

@52Betty Procrastination is the thief of time, and he has STOLEN my entire morning.

 Her two fellow procrastinators - both acquainted with Betty, but not with each other - smiled with fellow feeling when, simultaneously, 2000 miles apart, they read her words; they both then replied to her, as follows:

@carolinefo You said it, @52betty. I just looked away for a moment, and he snatched the morning away right from under my nose.

@richardethics The little bugger’s been round here and pinched most of mine, too, @52betty.

Back in Whitstable Betty laughed, and tweeted again:

@52Betty Do you think the 3 of us should start the Official Twitter Procrastinators Club, @carolinefo and @richardethics?

And that was the moment, the precise instant, when R and I appeared on each other’s timelines, and became aware of each other’s existence for the first time. We owe it all to Twitter and to @52Betty, long may she thrive and prosper.

Whenever anyone asks me how R and I met, I never hesitate, stumble, blush or dissemble; I never look shifty and evasive, or mutter something vague about how we were introduced by a mutual friend.

No, I say it loud and sing it proud:

‘We met on Twitter, actually – during a discussion about procrastination.’

 

 

nb The @richardethics Twitter account is no longer extant; R tweets now with a different Twitter name.