my wife has 99 friends. I have none. Is that bad?

As they say in Liverpool, my wife is made up at the moment. She is about to make her 100th friend on Facebook. Popular creature that she is, she actually knows, and quite well, every one of them. Her score is scarcely remarkable though. There is a girl in Palestine who has over 4000, though whether she knows them all intimately is another matter. I was on the Big F for about 9 months before I finally became frustrated by the shallowness of the posts nearly everybody (though not everybody)was publishing.

Someone has pointed out that F'book, like Twitter is all about NOW. People seem anxious to tell the World exactly what they are doing: that they have just eaten a Mars bar, drunk a cup of coffee or are feeling a bit hung over. So what? I find myself asking. Why do people think others are going to be even faintly interested in the boring minutiae of their lives? I'm fascinated by what people think and feel, about what makes them laugh or cry, what they they believe in, what they revere and what they revile, and why. Whether they picked their nose five minutes ago is of no particular interest to me.

But my wife, and my psychiatrist, worry about my social isolation. I told him the other day a typical day for me:
Lie in bed until around 9.30 watching TV.
Get up and collect recyclable rubbish from the streets for about an hour.
Write for 2 hours.
Have lunch.
Read for 2 hours.
Watch a bit more TV, perhaps a film or something else I have recorded from the previous night.
Wifey comes home and I make tea.
More TV, this time with her, leavened by a moderate amount of alcohol or other relaxant.

OK, not much contact with other humans, but is it such a bad life? I venture to suggest not.

POSTSCRIPT

Watching "This Morning" this morning (OK, it was a low point), I saw the estimable Max Clifford saying how he wouldn't represent Dr Murray should he be requested to do so. A guilty man, who was responsible for the death of one of his (Max's)greatest heroes, it would be a step too far. But he did, he revealed, represent OJ Simpson, because he "honestly did not believe he was guilty". Really Max? Really? I always used to have a bit of respect for you; often supporting the "little guy" against the dark forces of the media (eg Antonia de Sancha vs David Mellor), but now that respect is gone. That you could still support a man who every little piece of evidence points unerringly to the blood on his hands, shows there is something deeply wrong with your value system.

The Juice was found not guilty through the consummate skill of Johnny Cochran's defence team and a jury fearful of inciting riots like the ones that rocked LA only a couple of years earlier, following the aquittal of the police officers who beat Rodney King. But Max, guilty is guilty, whatever a jury might say. And if you can't see that there's something terribly wrong with you.