Of recent weeks there’s been a howling fuss about a group of silly little boys who went onto their website to describe activities that were – at the least – immoral if not illegal. (And IMHO they were also illegal) but the interesting thing to me was that they generated huge notice because they could be easily found and their own posted descriptions read. I then had my own example of this. A lady to whom I was known when I was a child and she was a teenager, wrote me. We’d lost touch for fifty-eight years, and recently there had been a series of flukes. She’d wondered of recent years what had happened to me but a marriage had meant my name wasn’t the one she’d known me by. I’d also wondered about her. But I couldn’t recall her married name – reasonably common anyway – and on googling her brother’s name, I found nothing. However – she was holidaying in Melbourne, and while in conversation the name of a relative of mine who lives there was mentioned. He wasn’t available just then, but eventually she did manage to speak to him and he was able to tell her both my current name, and that I was a book author. Ah Ha! she thought. Authors have websites. She looked me up, blinked at my credit list, discovered from a combination of that and the telephone book what my address was, and wrote – to my delight. So, thanks to social media we’re back in contact after 58 years. In fact if she’d googled Google Earth she’d even be able to see a view of my farm from the road that runs along the front of my property. I’ve never been quite so conscious before that we really are all members of the ‘Public. ‘
