Social media and communications stuff!

At some point during our long wait for the bus at Oporto airport last Friday I went to the loo. It's a perfectly natural thing to do, after all. I realised that the person in the cubicle next to mine was making a phone call. Not, in my opinion anyway, a totally natural thing to do. I can think of nobody I would need to call so urgently and importantly that it could not wait until after I had been to the loo. Especially a public loo. Just think of the background noise! Some people, however, simply cannot be incommunicado even while they pee. This is probably one of the reasons why so many mobile phones are dropped down the toilet. It's not just a matter of them falling out of trouser pockets; it's the desperate need to be communicating non-stop!

I say this in total awareness of the fact that I post a blog most days, check my email on a regular basis, ditto text messages, get a good deal of my news updates from what other people post on Facebook and have the habit of posting a picture on Facebook just about every day. But there are limits! Somethings you just don't do!

Maybe it's a generational thing.

Yesterday I read about the growing popularity of rosé wine. Sales are up by 15% or 16% apparently. Chilled rosé wine is the drink of the summer, they say, especially among the millennials. I can vouch for that, I think, if my son and his friends count as millenials. Born at the end of the 1970s, start of the 1980s, does that make them millenials or are they too old? Whatever the truth of that matter, here is the rosé thing. When my son, his wife and I eventually found some friends of theirs at the Tom Petty concert in Hyde Park - just under two weeks ago although it seems an age away - said friends had already purchased a bottle of chilled rosé wine. Another bottle of the same was acquired later. The wine came in a plastic bottle, properly wine-bottle shaped but still plastic. It seems that they manufacture such bottles and properly-shaped plastic wine glasses, complete with stems, just for such occasions. If you want a sophisticated picnic you need such things!

All of this is a far cry from the days when supermarkets in England seemed to sell only rather nasty wine called Corrida or straw-clad bottles of Chianti. Those straw-clad bottles were then trendily used as candle holders and allowed to become wax-be-dribbled as well as straw-clad. Ah, the joys of nostalgia!

Getting back to the trend for drinking rosé wine, it would appear that one of the reasons behind this comes from social media. If you document each moment of your existence with an Instagram photo, an aspect of social media I have so far resisted, then rosé wine comes in the perfect colour to be included in such photos. Less in-your-face than full-bodied red wine and not so photographically insipid as white wine, a glass of rosé is the ideal drink to include in the documentary of your sophisticated life!

Who knew?