Farming Breeds: Bob – the Twitter addict
Join us for a funny, irreverent look at some of the characters that make the British countryside what it is. Our tongue-in-cheek guide puts characters such as the retired Major, the “perfect” next-door farmer and the young tearaway under the microscope. Here we meet Bob, who’s been bitten by the social media bug and is never to be found without his smartphone…
Bob’s mad about Twitter.
He didn’t see the point of it at first – it was for teenagers and people who wanted to tell each other what they’d had for tea – but a friend showed him, he had a dabble and soon he was a convert. Tweets. Retweets. At messages. Direct messages. He knows all the terminology now.
He’s got the bug, alright. He’ll tweet in the tractor, in the kitchen, in the yard, in the office – he’s even been known to tweet in the bath.
He never goes anywhere without his smart phone. He left it at home one day and felt its absence like an itch on his skin.
“You spend more time looking at that wretched screen than you do at me,” his Mrs complains.
She’s taken his new-found obsession badly. She fears it may lead to bad things. Twitter is the internet and the internet means one thing as far as she’s concerned. Pornography.
It’s not like that, he reassures her. “It’s just like a farm discussion group – but online. It’s the new way of communicating.”
“You’re addicted,” she replies, impatiently. The fact that she’d heard Stephen Fry liked Twitter hadn’t helped.
He doesn’t think he is addicted, having read an article on the subject (naturally, he found the link to it on Twitter).
Bob’s dad, meanwhile is totally bemused about the concept. There again, he’s totally bemused about all of the internet. “The interweb,” as he refers to it. Hearing the word “hashtag” was the final nail in Twitter’s coffin as far as the old man was concerned. He’d once employed a cowman who’d had a liking for “hash” and that working relationship hadn’t exactly ended well.
“You can learn all sorts on Twitter,” Bob maintains. “News, prices, politics, even local gossip. I can find out what yields other farmers are getting and what the weather’s like in their area.”
Bob likes the immediacy of it and, in a job that can be so isolated, it kind of makes him feel connected.
He soon got the knack of what makes a good tweet. You only get 140 characters so you have to say things in a succinct way. In fact, he’s convinced the discipline has brought a new matter-of-factness to other areas of his life. A new no-nonsense approach.
“It’s very inclusive and very democratic,” he says, slightly pretentiously (repeating a phrase he’d read on Twitter).
It’s true: it is changing him. He’s a different person online to what he is in person. More assertive. More opinionated. Bigger, somehow.
Neighbours and relatives have seen the change. He was never exactly antisocial, but he was never exactly a party animal. Now, on Twitter, all of a sudden he’s Mr Gregarious.
He even went to a “tweet-up” – which, as he’s quick to explain, is a get-together in person of people who know each other on Twitter. It took a bit of doing because Bob’s never been a natural at meeting new people, but actually, they were all just like him.
You’ve only got to look at a few profiles (you get 160 characters for that) to see what sort of people use it. Serious people. Business people. Proper farmers. Everyone’s at it these days.
Bob had agonised over what to say in his short biographical note, having seen witty ones, self-important ones, self-deprecating ones, to-the-point ones and even cryptic ones.
It made him think about how he’d sum his life up in a few short words. He didn’t think “Keeps sheep and cattle” did justice to the man.
For a while, it ended up as “Keeps cattle and sheep and considering turkeys.”
Then he changed it to: “Farmer. Father”. He was proud of that one. Alliteration, he thought, remembering the word from school.
Afterwards, he spent days trying to come up with a third word beginning with “Fa”, but all he could think of was “Fatter than he used to be” and wasn’t comfortable admitting this.
He settled on “Farmer, father, fan of Twitter”.