No hiding place on the Net

Rob Eastoe, the Googling plumber

 

Sally Bercow et al. found out the hard way that tweets can land you in trouble.  For my part I have found that  blogs are not perhaps quite so invisible as I thought.  Every now and again I receive an email from someone unknown saying "I came across your blog..."   Over the past week, however, two other instances have graphically illustrated how nobody is invisible on the Net.

 

The first was when I was discussing with our plumber Rob Eastoe, pictured above, the niceties of the new shower he was erecting in our bathroom.  Having given my two-pennorth, I said that that had exhausted my expertise on the subject, and that I would return next door.  To which he replied "And I expect you'll write about it on Hastings Postcards".  He had come across the blog while idly surfing.  Fortunately I have no reason to say anything unkind about him.  And just in case he reads this, let me add that he is of course the Best Plumber in Hastings. 

 

The other instance followed my post the other day about our Stanza meeting in Brighton and the incident on the train.  Robin Houghton did a similar piece (though rather wittier) on her own blog, mentioning that we had been talking about the poet Ian Duhig.  The following day Ian Duhig tweeted a link to Robin's blog, which he had picked up on the Net, commenting that this was what happened when his poems were discussed in public.  This in turn was retweeted by Ruth Padel.  Fortunately I had been talking to Robin about him in the context of a fine poem he had had published in Poetry London, so no harm was done.

Bloggers, tweeters, Facebook followers, all sacrifice privacy to a certain extent.  We like to think we know what boundaries we have set.  But it sometimes comes as a surprise to find that what we have made public is just that: accessible to anyone and everyone.  As Sally Bercow has found out.

Antony Mair