#twidder

I’ve got no plans to leave Tumblr at this point (I’m a sfw artist after all, I’m barely affected) but if you’d rather follow me on Twitter, I’m going to start being more active over there, too. I’m @CapnMolasses

Riddler: Achoo!

Two-Face: [grumbles] ...bless you. As we were saying—

Riddler: ACHOO!

Two-Face: [growls] What the fuck is the matter with you?!

https://twitter.com/merritthon

There once was a young man in his mid teens who kept a rubbish diary, a detailed and often tedious analysis of his many frustrated infatuations which also provided a chronicle of the 2006/07 football season right down to its silliest stories. All of these infatuations ended many years ago and most of the football stories are forgotten by virtually everyone, with one notable exception: that of Les Reed, a former FA coach best known for a spell as Kevin Keegan and Howard Wilkinson's assistant in the England set-up. Amidst much chaos and many bad jokes, the unusually low-key Reed took the Charlton Athletic job for a few traumatic weeks in the winter of 2006. The young man in question was not even a Charlton supporter, but his concern for the meek and mild Reed was evident in his diaries that winter. Things came to a head when, just before Christmas, Reed was sacked. The young man acknowledged that Les was incompetent and did not suit the flashy world of Premier League football but this did not stop him from expressing sympathy when he heard of Reed's demise.

A chance encounter with a beautiful but clumsy Chinese woman in a shop and a moderately interesting UEFA Cup knockout phase kept the young man occupied for a time, but he later revisited his sympathy for Les Reed when copying and pasting old diary extracts into a chatroom conversation for some reason. He and several others spent virtually a whole night in interminable laughter at his fascination with this mundane figure.

Several more years passed in a haze of sociology exams, cannabis, girls who pretended to like The Velvet Underground and protracted transfer sagas. Inevitably, the young man revisted his interest in Reed. Older, wiser, schooled in European cinema and embarking on a brief and disastrous relationship with a profoundly odd young woman, he thought of Reed again for some reason. Although detesting the website, he decided to join Twitter in an attempt to spread his bizarre in-jokes about Les Reed to the wider footballing public, hoping to gain a cult following and a degree of credit for a very original (if strange) idea. He began to create a miniature narrative, involving Reed's pursuit of the then-vacant Birmingham City position. A subplot concerned Reed's attempts to rescue his friend Howard Wilkinson from a situation involving a broken down car and some stolen road signs. Alas, the project did not catch on and the young man forgot about it.

Over a year later, he checks a long abandoned email account in case it had received any interesting messages. It did not, but it did contain several Twitter messages urging Les Reed to return. Having long deleted his 'other' account on the website (one which he seldom used other than to rail against the idiotic concept of 140 character messages or the general shallowness of Twitter) it turned out he was still on the website. After much trouble navigating the badly-designed settings page of the website, the young man finally managed to deactive his account. He hopes it will be permanently deleted and, crucially, will contribute to statistics showing how many people leave Twitter (as we are often told how many people are flocking to the website, in spite of its virtual uselessness towards people who do not have a large following or an interest in self-promotion to a disinterested audience).