Grace Dent: Twitter might have turned into a party with 10 million guests, but I'm still loving every minute of it

It's reached that tipping point like Facebook did five years ago where the world and his tech-literate dog started arriving

Just another day on Grace Dent's Twitter timeline: Joey Barton, Rebekah Brooks, Derek Acorah (Getty Images)

Welcome, Britain's official 10 millionth Twitter user. Pull up a username, excrete your first techno-brainfart, make yourself comfy. If you're a Twitterland newby this week you'll notice we're mostly doing Joey Barton v Gary Lineker, the saga of Rebekah Brooks, silly Huey Morgan, Cameron's love for Pink Floyd, and that dog on Britain's Got Talent who "dances" for a cunningly hidden ham sandwich. Or perhaps that's just my timeline.

Twitter is a different beast for everyone riding it. Twitter is the medium, not the message. For me, it's invaluable and invigorating. I'm still smitten. I'm there by 7am daily, reading news and tittle-tattle. News of 10 million users didn't surprise me. The flock has grown now and I'm pretty certain the pace has quickened and grown rawer.

It's reached that tipping stage just like Facebook did five years ago where suddenly the world and his tech-literate dog started arriving. (Note to self: a tech-literate dog could definitely win Britain's Got Talent. Must buy ham and bread and begin training.) Once over, my Facebook experience was just joy, flirtation and party vibes, then suddenly it felt like opening my tent door at Glastonbury to find that gormless sod I rejected after primary school, who's now EDL top brass, smoking a bong in the porch and demanding I "like" Kasabian.

Similiarly, Twitter has the mood of the slightly gone-wrong party right now, but I love politics, TV tittle-tattle, pictures of daft sleeping cats and misc "chatting", so when a man last week sent me umpteen tweets saying how he wants to ejaculate on me, it was annoying but it won't get rid of me. I've heard from his like many times before and I know it's only going to get worse. In fact, there's a strong school of thought on new 10-million-user Twitter that he has the perfect right to tweet me it. I should grow one of those "thicker skins" people on the internet advise each other to grow all the time. At least when superwankman catches and skins me he can make a snug warm winter coat.

Another downside of Twitter reaching 10 million is the incessant begging by users to make random items a "trending topic". If you're in a planning meeting this morning and some berk begins talking dreamily about "trending topics", smack them hard with a foolscap file.

I've been a trending topic on a few occasions, usually when I put my frightening fissog on telly, and it's the equivalent of dancing through a carwash of shit in a bum-egg bikini. Oh, the first five minutes might be vaguely jocund, before 10,000 other people, mostly Americans, pitch in with the sort of abuse you thought you'd left behind when they eventually sectioned your comprehensive school bully.

"This person is dying, please make him a trending topic. Please RT!!" I'm now asked 20 gabillion times a day. Is there a family somewhere all crouched round a dying relative's bed holding a laptop up to the barely breathing face going, "Ooh look @bigdogz in Illinois says you're a fat lardass who had it comin!"? Awww, this makes us feel much better.

Regardless, I am still pro-Twitter, I take much more from it than it bleeds from me. Today, I bitched with friends about rain (empathy), I commiserated a mate on DM regarding an arse who was publicly rude about her (sympathy), I chatted about Little Mix's new "shop dummy press shots", Derek Acorah, 56 Up, The xx's return, and the Jubilee prep. I'm alone in my house but I'm wholly connected.

I'm quite sure that due to Twitter's niftyness, its relaxed opening hours and its free dispensement of cerebral sugar-rushes, 10 million users will quickly multiply to 20 million, then one day all of this fair isle. Even YOU, the ultimate Twitter naysayers curling your nostrils at this column like a repelled carthorse, reading it in the exact tones of epiglottal discomfort Paxman used to spit out, "And here's the weather."

I feel your pain, Nigel from Tring, I really do. All those comments you leave under every online Twitter news item quacking you can't see the point of leaving random comments online? They never get old. Loosen up, buddy. You could be connecting with people as non-self-aware and twonkish as you on Twitter! One of us, Nigel. One of us.

My Botox look – without the Botox

It's the 10th birthday of Botox. Hip-hip hooray. We'd buy it a cake but no one has any face movement to blow out the candles. As of yet, my face remains un-injected. No Botox at all. I don't say this out of hubris. At thirty-m&&%ph I've got lines on my face that I could feasiby wear a thong over, but right now I'm coping with "good foundation", "lots of sleep", "entering rooms backwards", and in dire times, "wearing a cardboard mask of Gemma Arterton".

One reason I might end up getting Botox is that nowadays it's just assumed women of a certain age have had it anyway. I've nothing to lose. Especially as I own one of those faces where the default setting is, "What?" Like many women, I've never walked around permenantly grinning with the cheery countenance of Anthea Turner remembering a lovely peach cobbler.

If you're like me, you'll know this state of being is of great chagrin to builders and cabbies who bellow "SMILE LUV!". And then Botox came along, which provided a reason. "She's full of Botox," I read frequently about myself. I wish my family would stop sending those messages. I must stand up for myself and fellow Leslie Miserables. It's not the Botox making us look like this. I had this stiff face on the log flume at Alton Towers aged 11. We'll smile when we're bloody ready.

Poor old Carlos. Such an easy mistake

What a cacophony of honest errors. Obviously as a marginally sane person, if someone gave me a large piece of cardboard bearing a mystery slogan in 100-point text magic-marker to wave around from the top of an open bus, I'd probably have a look what it said before "getting stuck in with holding it arms aloft grinning, doing wacky thumbs".

Thus my heart extends to poor confused Man City's Carlos Tevez. Not only was Tevez tricked by "rough lads who then ran off" into waving the sign, due to his poor English he couldn't understand it. What a palaver. Man City would have taken it off him sooner but they were dealing with a big dog who stole their homework.

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