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Saturday 17th December 2016

5136/18056

Heimlich died. I spat out my dinner when I heard. But the good news is that the Herring manoeuvre becomes top manoeuvre whose inventor is still alive! Bang! (Unless Heimlich is doing a Herring Manoeuvre and is going to turn up bright and well tomorrow). RIP Heimlich. Or rest whilst having your torso pumped continuously in the hope that it will bring you back to life (RWHYTPCITHTIWBYBTL). Again if I was Heimlich and knew I was about to die I would definitely have rammed my throat with stuff so I choked to death. For the irony. These dead people are fucking idiots when it comes to going out in an ironic/amusing way. I will show you how it is done. When the time comes.

Off to Cheddar today to see my folks before Christmas (which I will be spending with my in-laws). My dad was having trouble with his Twitter feed. Good on him for trying to engage with the 21st Century, but understandably, despite working with one of the first computers in the 1950s, some of it bewilders him. But then he’s an old Somerset man so he is also bewildered by someone in the distance slowly moving a torch from side to side. “Why is my Twitter just Peter Tatchell?” he asked. This was not a problem I had encountered before. “I don’t even know why I am following Peter Tatchell. It’s not that I don’t like him, exactly, but nor am I a fan. So why is my Twitter nearly all Peter Tatchell?” 

It’s a good question. I suspected the answer was that for some reason he was only following Peter Tatchell. Or that Peter Tatchell tweets a lot more than whatever other random celebrities my 80 year old dad is following for no good reason. For some reason a man being trapped in a Hell where he is mainly being tweeted by someone that he has no strong feelings about, seemed particularly amusing to me. You could have sat down all day and thought of the funniest celebrity for someone who doesn’t know how to use the unfollow feature to be inadvertently following and I don’t think you’d come up with anyone as comedically satisfying as Peter Tatchell. I looked at my dad’s Twitter feed and whilst he did have a few other people in his feed (including me - so glad he’s not missing out on all my gold, but fuck Tatchell must tweet a lot if he’s eclipsing even me), Tatchell was somewhat predominant. He likes to tweet and he likes to RT. Not for a second even thinking about he octogenarians who are inadvertently having to read every word, in spite of not really knowing who is he. Not bothered about their human rights, Tatchell? You hypocrite.

I unfollowed Peter Tatchell on behalf of my dad and instead followed Middlesbrough FC for him, in the hope that this might mean he didn’t have to constantly check Ceefax for the football scores, regardless of what the rest of us were watching. I mean, he doesn’t really need Ceefax at all as he has an iPad and the internet, but I was impressed that Ceefax was still going and that anyone was using it at all. And my dad is cool enough to be on Twitter, even if he doesn’t fully understand it. 

I think he will miss Peter Tatchell now he’s gone.

I think we might all do so eventually.



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