Letter from the editor: The narcotic quality Twitter posesses

I have now been on Twitter for about 24 hours, I’ve got 550 followers and counting, and I’ve tweeted eight times (don’t worry: you’ve not missed anything important).

As several people have pointed out to me, I can now kiss goodbye to those precious moments of quiet reflection, or an equally rare spot of daydreaming. No, from this point on, every spare minute will be spent glued to my Blackberry, waiting breathlessly for the latest communique from Piers Morgan.

I’ve resisted the temptation to join Twitter thus far for two reasons: I’m not sure what I say and do is of much interest to the world at large, and also, having something of an addictive personality, I can easily see the narcotic quality Twitter posesses. There was a childlike thrill about watching the number of followers grow throughout the day, and the feeling both of being connected and of having people you’ve never met hanging on your every tweet is extremely seductive.

Anyway, it’s done. I’ve succumbed, and whatever you’ve got on this weekend, take a moment to follow @Simon_Kelner. I’ll attempt to reward you with some shafts of wisdom (or at least let you know what the traffic’s like on the M40!). We have, it’s true, made one or two little mistakes since i started back last October. And you’ve always been kind enough to point them out to us. But we’ve never had the torrent of emails we had in response to an error in Friday’s paper when, in the graphic on page 2, we ran a picture the size of a postage stamp which we captioned as a character from the Gerry Anderson puppet show, Thunderbirds. Brian Scrivener was one of the masses who wrote to us, and he put it the most succinctly. “I know I am getting old (and sad!) when I can recognise Troy Tempest from Stingray mistaken for one of the Tracey clan from Thunderbirds.”

We hang our heads in shame. And our only excuse? Brains was off yesterday! Happy weekend!