I’ve been off social media for nearly two years but occasionally I stick my head around the door to see what I am missing. Ads, mostly. My Instagram feed often feels a bit like a giant Argos without the tiny pens and notebooks. It’s an Argos crossed with a cooking channel for people who don’t feel embarrassed about using pre-minced garlic in their spaghetti Bolognese. All those middle-aged mothers in Texas or Idaho demonstrating what they make for dinner for their families on a daily basis. It can be oddly mesmerising.
Lately I’ve also noticed many people on Instagram trying to get me to do a walking challenge. This is not just any walking challenge. It’s a tai-chi walking challenge. These people, if I am understanding them correctly, say traditional walking does not cut it any more and if you want to change your body and your entire life, you have to walk in the tai-chi style. There’s a woman on there who is 92 but says that since taking up tai-chi walking she keeps being mistaken for a teenager. You can see how people might get sucked in.
It’s nearly two years since I’ve posted anything on social media. Amazingly, the world kept spinning, which was a bit insulting. I live with someone who has never had a social media account so he doesn’t really understand what a big deal it was for me to stop putting my carefully curated rants, faux-spontaneous witty observations and envy-inducing life happenings online. I had wondered for a while whether my unpublicised adventures, that first trip to Rome last year, the time I ate seven different types of Key lime pie in the US, would be as fun if I wasn’t able to show them off in photographs to strangers on the internet. (Spoiler: they were.)
I’m not being smug about any of this. I blab about the minutiae of my life on a weekly basis here, after all. And rather than being self-congratulatory about my absence from social media, I often wonder what I’m missing out on and whether my life would be richer if I went back on the socials. So that’s why I am partial to a bit of a lurk. It rarely goes well.
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Take the bathroom situation. I have form when it comes to bathrooms and the internet. I once ordered a bath mat online and, when it arrived, it transpired that what I had actually ordered was a bath mat for a doll’s house. The latest bathroom news in my house is that our organiser, the plastic yoke that stored the seven million products required by two teenagers with long hair, finally buckled under the pressure.
All those millions of products needed to keep hair in check – [adopts Yorkshire accent] we had one bottle of Clinic shampoo between nine of us when I were a lass – have since been stored on the bathroom floor. Luckily, I recently went on the ‘gram and by an amazing coincidence there were a lot of people trying to sell me bathroom organisers almost as though they were eavesdropping on the intermittent conversations I’ve been having with my husband about whether one of us is going to do something about the storage situation in the bathroom.
What happens is somebody mentions getting a suitable product in Ikea. Which leads to a sidebar conversation about the joy of Swedish meatballs and gravy. Then somebody else mentions Muji. Then the other person says they read somewhere that the Muji in town closed down. Then nobody gets it together to do anything about the bathroom organiser situation and the area remains a cluttered, if fragrant-smelling, health and safety hazard.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed but the many people selling bathroom organisers on Instagram seems fairly certain that they have invented something revolutionary. It’s a bit like the tai-chi walking. These “caddies” or “bathroom hacks” are not just going to store your bathroom products using the power of suction – everything is suction-powered these days; drills are so 1987 – they are probably going to change your actual life. I’d like to say I made an impulsive decision in investing in not one, but four of these things but I can’t. I actually studied various different types of social media bathroom organisers before handing over €63. I was thrilled with myself.
They took six weeks to arrive. Then they sat in brown boxes on the stairs waiting for someone to activate the power of suction and attach them to the bathroom walls. You’ll never guess what happened next, as they like to say online. When eventually my husband got around to putting them on the walls, they stayed there for about five minutes before collapsing. It turned out they didn’t actually work as efficiently as I had been led to believe. Shocker.
A friend of mine recently ordered a sunset lamp off Instagram. A sunset lamp is supposed to simulate the sunset. To her surprise it did not do that. Not put off by the suction fiasco, I recently ordered a life-changing, gravity-defying bra but it turned out it was just a crappy bit of Lycra-adjacent material in the vague shape of a bra. I think my lurking days might be over. After I finish this tai-chi walking challenge.
