Deborah Ross: Stay off Twitter unless you're very popular

If you ask me...

If you ask me, joining Twitter is a big, big mistake and I would strongly counsel you against it, as it will only end in tears, particularly if you are an unpopular person, as I am, although, in my defence, I would at least like to get one thing straight: I don't look like an egg in real life. (Except on Tuesdays, which is always Look Like An Egg day in my house, and very magical it is too.)

The thing about Twitter is that it's just so hurtful. I joined a week or so ago (@deborahross, although I'd sincerely warn you against it) and, at first, I was over the moon to have 130 followers. I was made-up. I was chuffed. But then Rhodri Marsden (@Rhodri) posted a photograph of his dinner, which was looked at by 142 people, and it suddenly hit home: I am actually less popular than a photograph of someone's dinner. Do you have any idea how much it hurts, knowing you are less popular than a photograph of someone's dinner? It was a duck stir-fry and you know what? It's not even the best duck stir-fry I've ever seen. Do you know how much it hurts, knowing you are less popular than a duck stir-fry which looked, dare I say, a little dry?

Seriously, I would have thrown myself under a truck had I not been too frightened of what everyone would say about me after I died. She leaves behind a husband, child, and such a piddly number of followers we're kind of embarrassed on her behalf? The rabbi felt obliged to drink four espressos and a Red Bull prior to conducting her funeral, fearing she'd be as dull in death as she had been in life? And what might be on my gravestone? There was no one she couldn't put to sleep? Worse, there was no one she couldn't put to sleep plus she looked like an egg most days, and not just on Tuesdays, as she had always imagined? Did she never clock that everyone called her "Egg Face" behind her back?

I have tried tweeting, twice. I have nursed my tweets and and sent them out there to be loved, and? Nothing. Diddly-squat. So I'm useless and a failure and am less enticing than a duck stir-fry that, dare I say, actually looked like a messy, upturned kebab. However, please don't tell @simonkelner about any of this or he'll rightly sack me for being the least popular person on the paper, if not of all time. Also, he doesn't know I look like an egg and the shock might kill him. He is no spring chicken, you know.