My launderette! And a bit of Facebook-related ranting!

Grandma’s cafe has expanded its business and has become grandma’s launderette this week. My daughter’s washing machine has developed a fault. Consequently she arrives here at regular intervals with bags of washing and suddenly my washing machine is busy nonstop. It’s a good job we have had some fine and sunny and warm weather to get stuff dry. That said, she does take some wet stuff hime to put in her tumble dryer.

Back in the day, when I had children around and felt the need to wash clothes every day, if my machine played silly beggars, I had to put the stuff in the car and go off to an actual launderette. Those establishments seem to be thin on the ground these days. In fact I see more of them in Vigo than I do here. Odd!

Facebook friends come in at least two categories. There are those who are your friends in real life, people you have known for ages, some of whom you meet from time to time for lunch and some who just stay in touch through social media. Others are often friends of friends, people you may have met once or twice at the most but who are vaguely in tune with you and so become Facebook friends. Two “real” friends of mine became “Facebook friends” in that way and only discovered months later that one had been the German teacher of the other’s daughter. That’s the kind of small world stuff that happens in my life! If you are really daft, you have another category of friends: people who have somehow seen a post of yours and decide to “friend request” you. If you accept all of those you end up with thousands of nonsense friends.

I was prompted to write all that because I wanted to comment on the recent post of a “Facebook friend”. It was a photo of a dog looking miserable and hiding his face. She commented on the photo: “Someone is feeling sorry for themself”. I winced! Even the spell check picks it up! If you must insist on using “they” and “them” to refer to singular people (or animals), then you must be consistent. “Themself” is a nonsense, neither singular nor plural. Surely it should be “themselves”. But there is only on dog in the picture! Besides it’s HER dog and surely she knows whether it is male or female so that she could say “himself” or “herself”. And this “Facebook friend” is supposed to be a linguist (she was taught German by the “real friend” mentioned earlier - that’s how we became “Facebook friends”) and so she should know better than to mangle the language!

Having got that rant out of the way, here comes another one.

Someone suggested that mothers should be banned from posting numerous pics of their babies. I can sympathise; some people do ho a little over the top and will have some embarrassed teenagers in the future. But personally feel the same, and possibly even more strongly, about people who post cute pics of dogs, especially of people kissing dogs, treating dogs as human beings and generally getting over-sentimental about it all.

Worst of all is when they combine the two: - pictures of new babies snuggled up to dogs!!!

As for me, I mostly post pictures of places I go, trees and flowers and interesting birds I see along the way. According to some columnist I read at the weekend I am very in trend, as they say. The latest thing for Instagram, apparently, is not a selfie of the poster wearing something elegant but a picture of a place, proving how ecologically sound the poster is. There you go.

The columnist then went on to point out that it is only the most privileged of us who can post such pictures as only the wealthy live in those places with greenery and trees and flowers.

Such nonsense. Some of us are quite ordinary people who happen to live a short walk away from a green place!