A friend to all is a friend to none (Aristotle)

I got an email from Barclaycard recently entitled ‘Your holiday edition of Contactless Living’. Despite the fact I barely use my Barclaycard – I only signed up to consolidate my existing debts into one monthly interest free payment – my immediate reaction was that somehow they knew a lot more about my current social life than I really wanted them to.

A quick click and I discovered that it was actually a digital magazine about those new credit and debit cards that you merely have to wave in the general direction of a machine to buy things, rather than going through all that pointless rigmarole of secret pin numbers and authorisation.

Nevertheless, I do sometimes worry about my lack of friends in the real and digital worlds. I have about 70 friends now on Facebook, some of whom don’t count (sorry, mum). To be fair, that’s balanced out by those who resolutely and persistently refuse to participate whether through a lack of time, a lack of interest or a lack of even basic technical knowhow. So 70 is probably about right, and in many ways 70 seems a healthy number of friends to have.

But some friends, who on the surface have led broadly similar lives to my own, seem nonetheless to know hundreds upon hundreds of people. Where they found the time to meet all these folk and how come they all were willing Facebook users I can’t for the life of me fathom. Let’s rephrase that; until a few days ago I couldn’t fathom it. Perhaps I now have the answer.

Because it seems you can buy Facebook friends. If you don’t believe me, put the phrase into Google. Admittedly this service is mainly aimed at small businesses in order to falsely boost their company profile and thus, so the theory goes, push them up to the top on a Google search. But it can also be used to make you as a person seem a lot more popular than you actually are.

Try this site, for example, aimed at American students. It appears you can buy 500 friends for just $17. I’ll save you the maths and exchange rates, that’s just over 2p a friend. Not even I can be bought for that little.

You need to be careful which site you use, though, because many will provide you with hundreds of new friends with Filipino or Bangladeshi names, something that may be less than convincing if you haven’t travelled further than Birmingham in the last 6 months.

It's the end of the world

I’m trying to make sure I get this written and published well before the 21st. I’m pretty certain it won’t be the end of the world, but I want to make sure there’s still plenty of time to do some serious eating, drinking and being merry should things start to look at all portenteous...

If it does happen, I’m going to be incredibly pissed off. Because Friday 21 is also my last day at work until January 2 and, apart from weekends, I haven’t had a day off since the end of August. For the world to end just as I’m about to start an 11-day break would be irritating to put it mildly.

My employers are also counting on it being a normal day, because they’re insisting we’re not going to be let out early, apocalypse or not. Admittedly, they’re making what for them is an extravagant gesture by getting us all pizza for lunch, but that doesn’t seem like an end-of-the-world gesture. Mind you, if it turns out they’ve got us Waitrose pizzas I might start to worry again.

The myth debunkers, meanwhile, have been trying to calm us all down by likening the Mayan calendar to one of our own, observing that we don’t all start panicking towards the end of December each year when we notice there seem to be no days after the 31st. The fact that next year’s calendars have already been in the shops for at least six months and that most of us receive at least three, plus a couple of desk diaries, for Christmas is, however, a fair indication that another year is generally expected to follow.

Perhaps it’s all down to a delay caused by the Mayans still working on their next 5125-year calendar which, let’s face it, is going to take a lot of work, especially as there are a lot fewer of them than the last time they had to put one together. That goes double if they’re doing it a page a day and, unlike last time, they’ll also need to ensure they’ve cleared copyright on all the pictures they’re using.

The good news, however, is that when they finally do get it printed, all this publicity should boost their sales considerably.