I fall out with hashtags. I thought there would be recipes and...well...far more Sherlock, to put it frankly.

#OscarNoms said the little sidebar thingy on Twitter that tries to get me interested in things, mostly in vain.  Oooh, that's nice, I thought.  I was expecting recipes, nibbly things to eat whilst watching the Oscars ceremony.  Not that I do, of course, it's far too late at night and filled with people with beards that I've never heard of, that's the people, not the beards, of course I've heard of beards, I don't live in a bucket.  But it's the principle of the thing - the thing, obviously being food.

Well.  Apparently in this instance, 'Noms' was short for 'Nominations'.  So instead of a hundred things to do with a piece of cheese and a dollop of mayonnaise, all I got was a list of names of people (probably all with beards) that I've never heard of!

These, for the record, are NOT Oscar Noms.  I've hardly ever been so disappointed.

Then I find #StoryofmyLife.  This will be interesting, I thought.  People writing the story of their life in 140 characters or less... Wondered about trying to sum up my own in 140 characters.  But I pretty much started out as an innocent with a porridge fixation, like Goldilocks and have ended up as a high-functioning sociopath, ie, Sherlock.  So, that's pretty much my life story in just two characters.  Although, for a while there in the middle I was a bit more of The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe, so I suppose we should call it three characters, for completion's sake.

From this...

Via this...

To this. I think I turned out all right, but, by heck, that scarf does itch...

But do you know what?  When I went over to #Storyofmylife, filled with eager expectations of people trying to sum up their lives with nothing but recourse to fairy tale characters or, of course, people with beards I'd never heard of, do you know what I got?

It's a song, apparently.  Not an interesting discourse on expressing one's self through tropes.

Twitter, you are far too open to misunderstandings.  I demand that all hashtags be properly expressed. Although I think that #StoryofmylifebywhichImeanthe1Directionsongandnotafarmoreinterestingproposition might be more than 140 characters.  Sigh.

Things suck. Or, rather, things which are meant to suck but don't...they suck. If you see what I mean.

You know that feeling of disappointment, - the one where someone has given you something you've been waiting for for ages, something you are just desperate to get your hands on, then it arrives and you are sooooo happy and excited and you start using/wearing it only to find that after a couple of weeks it breaks/the sleeves fall off/it unravels?

That.

Oh, nothing to do with Christmas, obviously. No, all my prezzies there are just delightfully going strong. Apart from the ones I've eaten, and most of those were meant to be eaten, so that's all right.  No.  Remember several weeks ago, when I got indecently excited about the fact that I had bought myself a new hoover head for my birthday?

Yes. I know it was sad. But, let's face it, if you don't buy a hoover head for yourself, then who else is going to buy one for you?  So, anyway.  I bought a lovely, brand-new and inordinately expensive new head for my Dyson Pet.  That's a hoover that is especially designed for picking up pet hair, not that I've got a pet with interchangeable heads,  that goes around sucking bits off the floor....no, actually, all my pets go around sucking bits off the floor, particularly if those 'bits' are cheese or biscuit related.  It looked like this...

for a while. Then it got sort of dirty and chipped, and the bucket-opener stopped opening, but it still sucks like a cat that's found some old Stilton down the back of a sofa cushion.

Six weeks later, the head stopped working.  Yep, in the midst of the Christmas clear-up, it just made a brief, funny noise and ceased its rotation. I am poor, and that head cost me a week's food money! And now I am poor and annoyed and without a working hoover! Of course I have e-mailed Dyson!  In fact, a brief exchange has been continuing since Thursday, but so far all I've had from them has been a computer-generated e-mail asking for the serial number of my hoover (which is fairly irrelevant, since it's not the hoover that is broken, they supplied me with the new head and have the order details, and I'd quite like to speak to a person not a computer).

Well.  If this situation continues much longer they are going to feel the wrath of the comedy blogger!  Not, I hasten to add, the comedy wrath of the blogger, which is something different and involves me hitting people with a squeaky bladder on a stick whilst wearing tinsel.

Yes, I am cross, people. Cross. You may wish to avoid me for the next few days until this matter is resolved.  If the matter has to be resolved with the old 'squeaky bladder on a stick' routine, you may wish to avoid me for even longer...

Shut up and get on with it

And what, I hear you cry, is your New Year's Resolution, Jane?

Well, thank you for asking!  Most of the things I make resolutions about are the subject of restraining orders, so probably best not talked about, but this year I've got a real one.  And it's clean and everything, so I can actually talk about it, which makes a change, because it doesn't include the words ***!! , ##&$, or Tony Robinson!

Restraining order, restraining order....

For this year I resolve to actually get my head down to do more writing.  Actual writing, that is, not all the peripheral stuff like Facebook and Twitter and reading amusing blogs or looking at pictures of kittens, which is what we writers spend long hours doing, while convincing ourselves that we are doing publicity/networking/research.  One day we're actually all going to write books about kittens just to prove that it was real research, and then where will you be?

And they all lived happily ever after.

I have no excuse really.  The day job occupies my life from 6am until 1.40 (getting out of bed and getting home times, actual time spent 'working' not shown).  Afternoons are, therefore, extended periods of time in which I could be banging out handcrafted words on the anvil of my laptop, well, if you take out the necessity of dogwalking and food preparation, and the non-necessary tasks of hoovering and dusting and generally making sure that the house doesn't become something like Sleeping Beauty's Castle, only without the beauty and usually without the sleeping either.  More like 'Dozing but jerking awake every ten minutes average looking but scrubs up well on a good day's castle really.  Which is a bit long to go on the nameplate outside, now I come to think of it.

The problem is that the lure of Being A Writer is often stronger than the lure of actual Writing which, while it isn't alligator-wresting, and can be done in the warm with a plate of HobNobs, can be Really Hard Work, particularly when Time Team in on  or there are kittens to look at.  But then, I guess it's not much of a New Year's Resolution if it doesn't involve a little self-sacrifice, is it?