This picture would be a bit sexier if I'd brought the washing in first.

Just imagine if your first ever avatar depicted you covered in soil pretending to be a carrot, with no makeup, drinking a dangerous alcoholic concoction, being soaked with a bucket of iced water, practically every Facebook ridiculousness in one photo would ensure that you won the Internet and would probably be put in charge.

I’ve never really been a fan of Facebook and the element of playground silliness that goes with it; no sheep has ever been thrown on my watch and nobody neck-nominated me. I did do what is in my opinion the best take on the ice-bucket challenge, and thanks to a nomination from a friend I recently posted my first ever profile picture.

I’m not sure why everyone is doing this all of a sudden; unlike the ice-bucket challenge or any of the breast cancer awareness posts (bra colour one year, ‘I’m flying to Tenerife’ another year – I’m disappointed that ‘no bra day’ didn’t catch on last year) there doesn’t seem to be any charitable reason behind it. This concept might have made sense last year when Facebook celebrated its tenth anniversary. There’s a certain era of people whose first avatars were actually from their long abandoned (or in my case deleted) MySpace account, which was the case for the above offering of mine. The photograph actually began its life as my Friends Reunited profile before I was on MySpace and it was then used when I joined Facebook (reluctantly) in 2007. As I explained on Facebook, the reason I kept the same picture for so long is because in the pre-selfie early days of digital photography, uploading photographs from a phone camera in 2007 was a bellyache of a task that sometimes took weeks.

Another thing from the olden days of the Internet that youngsters won’t be able to get their heads around is that in the olden days of social media (way back when it was called social networking) there was no Internet access on mobile phones so all of our thanking for the add and sheep throwing was all done while sitting at an actual computer. When Facebook’s wheels started in motion back in 2007 it was all computers based, but Facebook was a very different animal back then. MySpace had its moment in the sun before Internet portability so very few people operated their accounts by phone, in fact I doubt that very many people MySpaced on the move. The migration from MySpace to Facebook was one of those things that people didn’t quite want to commit to, and to this day I can’t understand why MySpace lost popularity so rapidly when it was far better at the time. I refer of course to the time of the 1.0 and 2.0 profile layouts and not the mess that it is now.

My thoughts have turned to those olden days thanks to this current sharing of our first profile pictures, and it occurred to me that there will be people using Facebook that never had a MySpace account. There’s a generation gap that nobody has pointed out before, even weirder was the experience I once had when someone younger than me didn’t know about throwing sheep at people.

It’s as if we were using a steam powered version of the Internet.

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This week’s edition of The Sunday Alternative is here.

I’m not very keen on following the herd, especially when it comes to ‘pass it on’ fads on social media, not that I disapprove of charity of course and I appreciate that these things are done with the best of intentions. The ALS ice bucket challenge is one of these trends currently doing the rounds, which I assume needs no further explanation at the moment. If you’re reading this in the future, then please Google it, assuming that Google is still going. There have been detractors of course, but that just proves Oscar Wilde’s observation that not being talked about is worse than being talked about, because this has worked a treat in raising awareness.

Had the weather stayed nice I might have gone ahead with the conventional challenge video and had cold water poured over me. However, I would have wanted my video to be a bit more special than simply copying everyone else. Luckily, inspiration came to me from somewhere and I formulated the plan to create something that meant that I didn’t back down from my nomination. Sir Patrick Stewart swerved the trend with his contribution to the cavalcade of videos, using ice in a far more enjoyable way and making a charitable contribution, something that my friend Gary did in his video (he was paying homage, not copying) before nominating me.

Gary not getting wet made me decide on an alternative approach too, and I came up with the punch line of ‘an ice bucket’ sounding a lot like ‘a nice bucket’ before I had any other idea of what I was going to do. This is how a lot of the great comedy was created, although I am not aligning myself with the comedy greats, that’s for other people to do. My first idea was to get someone to film me in a variety of supermarkets, pound shops, and those shops that fall into the weird category of being a pound shop in spirit; B&M, Home Bargains, Wilko etc, and comparing buckets. I had a plan to point them out and pick them up simply repeating “that’s a nice bucket” before ending with “I was asked to make a nice bucket video”. The repetition in what basically is a dull sketch is for me a brilliant piece of comedy when done properly; Peter Griffin trying to remove a dead frog is a perfect example of this. Unfortunately you only have 24 hours to fulfill your challenge and time would not allow for such tomfoolery. At some point I was hit with the idea of decorating a bucket to make a nice bucket and from that point I had to work backwards to create a video.

Aside from books, DVDs, videos, records, and various boxes of files and paperwork, I also share my office with our Christmas decorations. A whole corner of the room is given over to boxes, bags, fake trees (one for each room), bin liners of cuddly toys and stockings, and various other festive adornments. For some reason the idea of making the video a bit Christmassy came to me, the joke being that it is still summer, and I was able to work from there.

Watching the (one take) video back I was disappointed that I had used the word ‘festive’ too many times rather than vary what I was saying, (this is the biggest crime a writer can commit). I should also have written down the names of the people I wanted to nominate as I only picked the people out as an afterthought because I was trying to think of people I hadn’t seen taking part already. Lisa De Ville (to use her showbiz name) had posted a status on Facebook earlier in the week asking what the ice bucket challenge was as she hadn’t been online much due to work, which is exactly why I picked her.

If I applied as much care and attention to my work I wouldn’t be stressing over unfinished scripts and a half recorded audio book.

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