You know what I love?

Right! I love writing haiku.

That’s why this is one.

Haiku - as you know - is a form of Japanese poetry, consisting (usually) of three lines, with 5-7-5 syllables respectively.

I first stumbled across it in secondary school where my English teacher, Mr Coen, insisted we spend an hour writing Haiku about flowers and trees and all that kind of crap. He was of the ‘must include a season in the second line’ school, and we resented him for that.

This is the same man who forced us to read Tarka the (fucking) Otter. This is the same man who thought that the Canterbury Tales needed to be read by 11 year olds in the original Middle English. It’s also the same man who introduced me to Orwell, Shakespeare, J Alfred Prufrock, wordplay and punnery and the joy of the dicking about with the English language just for the hell of it. Funny how it takes years for that kind of thing to sink in, by which time it’s too late to say a proper thank you.

Haiku is brilliant for a number of reasons. Firstly it’s short. It takes two minutes to write one; five for a really good one. The second is that it forces you to stick to a really rigid form, and still say something meaningful. Which takes a bit more time than you’d think.

In The Friday Thing, we used to have a feature called Haiknews (or variably ‘Haikgeist’) where we summed up the week’s main news in the form of a Haiku. It was one of my favourite sections to write for and I’d like to think some were pretty ok. This one, for example, from the week in which both Terry Shiavo and the Pope died…

Terri Schiavo dies
God incandescent with rage
Kills Pope in revenge

A few weeks earlier, 25th March 2005 (Good Friday), the Pope’s condition was reported to be heading south. Leading to…

Pope about to die
But don’t you worry, Catholics
He’ll be back Sunday

And of course this…

London Olympics
Transport regeneration
Off to rocky start

…from our Seven / Seven special issue.

It’s quite a challenge to make them funny in the space allowed, in much the same way as writing for tabloids is more of a challenge than writing for broadsheets. You have to fit an entire story into 50 words, and at least ten of them have to be bold-face tabloidese, otherwise you’ll be SLAMMED by CHIEFS. And heaven knows would the onlookers would think.

Yes, there’s something that really gets me off about writing to a strict template. And so it is that I am both saddened and terrified by the news that Facebook is to drop the mandatory ‘is…’ from status updates.

No longer will we be forced to say ‘Paul is… doing something’, now it’s just ‘Paul…’.

Perhaps ‘Paul… wants to be a woman’ or ‘Paul… has fallen off his Segway’ or ‘Paul… ate all the Skittles.’ The verb is my oyster. Actually, fuck, I don’t even need a verb.

‘Paul… happy! Yay!’

Yuck, yuck, yuck.

“Oh, but it gives users more freedom,” they say. And so it does. Freedom from having to think. Freedom to write whatever shit falls out of our brain without a second thought as to whether it’s a proper sentence, or even whether there’s a verb. It’s a sop to the people who think it’s acceptable to update their status to read (and this is an actual example, with the name and love object changed to protect the guilty)…

‘Katie is… has got a new car. And I’m loving it!!!!!!!’

No you is haven’t Katie you fucking lazy, idiot mong. And, by the way, how difficult is it to remember which personal pronoun you’re supposed to be using?

Mark my words, this is the beginning of the end of the creative, amusing status update. Without rules to inspire creativity and - very occasionally - wit, there is zero need to make an effort. And so we won’t. Before the year is out, our mini-feeds will be awash with LOL’s! and txt spEk and people like Katie who think that it’s cute to use the present continuous of ‘love’.

Seriously, Katie, won’t you just is dying? Thanx laydee!!! Mwah!

And where status updates go, the rest of Facebook will surely follow. Already profile pages are starting to fill up with zombies and whiteboards and gardens full of digital flowers and all of the other crap we left MySpace to get away from. With this last fort of order and structure taken, how long can it be before Greenday marches in, whining out of the built-in music players of a thousand goth and Emo profiles like a war cry for the stupid and identically unique? How long until Scrabulous is banned as bourgeois and the ‘poke’ becomes the ‘fuck’?

Weeks, for sure, not months.

First they came for the clean navigable profile pages, but I did nothing because I was a Zombie.

Then they came for the simple innuendo of the ‘poke’, but I did nothing because I wanted to throw a sheep.

Then they came for the ‘is…’ and I did nothing because I are loving the fr33dom!!!

And then they came for me.

But I was long gone.

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