I’M A DONKEY

Oh Lindz. I feel your pain.

Social media, you little tyke. You have sucked me in and shown me for what I truly am: nothing but a flagrant show off, strutting my stuff online before I even think to fact-check. I’m like Lindsay Lohan Instagramming an Arabic message that she thought read ‘you’re beautiful’ but actually read ‘you’re a donkey.’

I feel like a bit of an ass myself right now.

Because like Lindsay, I just want to inspire my Instagram followers (all 70 of them – beat that, Lohan.).

I like pretty pictures and I’m always looking for things in my life to Instagram the shit out of. And that’s what I did, the day my crafty monkey of a husband told me that he’d heard the chickens making a hell of a clucking earlier, perhaps we should go check on their eggs.

Obligingly, I skipped over to the coop. I thought it was a little lazy that he was encouraging me to go look instead of just going himself, but one never remonstrates about these things, it’s only with hindsight that one realises one was being had.

I opened the coop. Lo! Behold! A chicken had laid an enormous egg!

I’m not the sharpest tool in the box and I’m very, very trusting, so if there’s a giant egg in my coop, my first thought is not… hang on a minute, something’s amiss here. No. My first thought is… It’s a miracle! Instagram is going to love this!

I grabbed my phone and quickly took a picture of said egg next to a normal bantam egg, for comparison purposes. I couldn’t wait to upload the picture and show my online world what one of our chickens had squeezed out.

Look at all those heart shaped approvals of my egg shaped eggs.

I spotted my husband taking a picture of me taking a picture of the eggs, and figured he was trying to beat me to Facebooking the miracle egg news. I was actually a little annoyed – this was MY find and I wanted to be the one to let the online world know. I certainly didn’t want the embarrassment of us ‘Double Partner Posting’ as I call it, the horror of two people photographing the same thing. I mean, we want people to think we’re not entirely living for our online life. I only allow DPP when I’m taking a picture of Gaz taking a picture, because it’s art. Like this:

This is art.

As Gaz took a picture of me taking a picture of my egg, little did I know he was documenting my idiocy for his own amusement.

I uploaded the picture to Facebook too. My lovely friends liked and commented, just as I craved. They wondered what we’d been feeding the poor chooks, encouraged me to crack it open and see what the hell was inside the shell. A double yolk perhaps, maybe even a triple. They were as excited as I was.

31 likes and 13 comments on this bad boy. Feed my ego, people!

Then my dad came in. I blame him for my trusting nature. He was so authoritative when I was young, I just took everything he said as gospel and never had any reason to doubt anything. Now my life is basically Gullible’s Travels.

Look, father! I said, presenting the magic egg to him. One of the chickens laid it!

Dad knew instantly it was a set up, unlike old muggins over here.

Between fits of laughter at my expense, my husband then managed to tell me it was a goose egg he’d bought at the farm shop while stocking up on licorice and coffee. He had never anticipated the trick would work so beautifully.

I was, of course, embarrassed that I’d been so foolish as to believe him and so quick to social media the moment. But that’s my generation for you – we’re Instagrammers, Facebookers, Twitterers. Twats. We’re a generation of twats, too quick to take the best bits of our lives online.

From now on, I’m sticking to generic pictures of trees in blossom and flowers in bloom for my Instagram feed.

A safe picture of some flowers that I instagrammed, before basking in the glory of 13 heart shaped approvals.

The goose egg was very nice poached over toast with a side helping of humility, just so you know.