What is there to do when you’re young and restless, and you live in the back of beyond? When Grange Hill features kids taking heroin, screwing around, spending every Friday night down the youth club disco or spraying offensive words on bus stops, yet you don’t even have so much as a bench to vandalise? There wasn’t a youth club, or even a park to mooch around in and look threatening. There was a sports day once a year, but as that was organised by a family whose members made up a good two thirds of the village, well, they won every event. There was a Christmas party, but Santa always turned up pissed, and got the presents mixed up, and nobody wanted to sit on his lap.

And that was it. There was one road in, and one road out. A bus a week. The village itself was surrounded by squelching marsh and gorse bushes. We couldn’t even get Channel 5 tuned in properly.

Where do you turn when your life is about as exciting as a bag of flour, and anything seems preferable to boredom? Even Channel 5?

Well, there was once source of entertainment, that was free, didn’t require transport, and was just illicit enough to guarantee a cheap thrill without getting into any real trouble. Weirdo baiting.

As I think I mentioned, our little community was stocked full of the choicest cuts of freak. There was always somebody to pick on, wind up or narrowly avoid being assaulted by. If this has been the suburbs, the residents would have had panic buttons installed, or written to the newspapers every time one of us got a bit too close to their geraniums. Being the wild wild west, they preferred to chase us in a 4x4 until the petrol ran out. Never seeming to realise that this was exactly the reaction we were after.

I have very fond, only slightly disturbing memories of Grand Master Flash, who was always a joy to provoke. He lived with his parents, and was a few years older than us, with the receding hairline to prove it. Apparently his girlfriend had decided they weren’t meant to be when she woke up one night and found he had climbed through her bedroom window and was watching her sleep. He claimed she made the whole thing up, and at fourteen, I was no real judge of character, but there was definetely an element of the unstable about him. For one thing, he had never left home. For another, he was far too old to be hanging around with us.

We were convinced he was the next Norman Bates. He was ill at ease with the idea of even standing around outside his house, after a long and forceful campaign we finally got him to let us inside for ten minutes but we weren’t allowed to make any noise. There was no chance of ransacking the wardrobe for bodies, he even accompanied you to the toilet. From the brief glimpse we got of his parents, they seemed normal, so I don’t know what the deal was. Perhaps they didn’t know he was still living there. There wasn’t much conversing with him either. Asked why he had a fish tank in his room, he replied ‘I like fish’, encouraged to talk about his trip to Australia, he mused ‘it was hot’. So really, there wasn’t a lot else to do except wind him up.

Winding GMF up was remarkably easy, a toddler presented more of a challenge. All you had to do was make a joke about his mobile disco or his (non-existent) sex life. And he was gagging for it. We once told him that the oldest Elvis (of Elvis, Elvis and Elvis) was a 22 year old blonde nurse who was up for a good time, and, having never met the family, he actually went up to their house (dodging bullets and crawling through barbed wire along the way) and asked if she was home. Except she was a he. And still at school.

I once engaged him in a conversation about something or other whilst the rest snuck around the corner and let all his tyres down. Watching him attempt to drive home with his wheels flapping about like washing in the wind was a gold star moment. Yet, he still carried on loping around the village with us. He must have really needed the company.

We all found him a bit sinister, but that was part of the attraction. We liked to make up stories about the entire family sleeping together, or GMF using a human head to serve peanuts to guests, but that was just harmless fun.

Turns out, GMF had his own ideas of what constituted harmless fun. One fine day, page four of the local paper announced to the entire county that a Mr GMF had been remanded in custody for exposing himself on a local beach to a group of old ladies. Later that same fine day, news broke that he had also stood naked in his bedroom window as a neighbour walked her dog past, but his mother insisted that he had some special cream from the doctor, and just happened to be rubbing it into that particular area, at that particular moment.

Imagine the delight. Our friend, the flasher! Well ok, our ‘friend’. We confronted him within seconds of finding out. We offered to accompany him on his next outing. When he got nasty, we chanted ‘flasher, flasher, FLASHER!’ And for some reason, he never wanted to follow us around again after that.

Yes, observe. Not interfere with.

That is until they were presented with a baby who was probably going to die from a shocking case of malaria, and the time-honoured tradition of making a poultice out of bark and applying it to cuts made with a razor didn't seem to be having much effect.

So they stepped in. And then it all got a bit Holby City. But the kid began to improve. They probably saved his tiny life. How many people could have stood by their promise to stay out of they way and trust a method of medicine which has been used for hundreds of years, when they can see it might not work? If it were me, I'd have on red alert with the Calpol and the infant thermometer.

* blog

* write up three monthly reviews for every child I work with

* e-mail those reviews to various social workers

* get hold of a plumber

* drink tea

* brush stolen Hob Nob crumbs off my cardigan

* remove further crumbs from back teeth

* suppress pre-menstural urges to throw phone through window, rip up carpet and tear pages from my diary one by one whilst laughing hysterically.

* use Word to check spelling of suppress is correct (it wasn't).

The papers are convinced it's a virtual drive-by for identity thiefs and paedophiles.

The people who use it have to log on every fifteen seconds to update their status - 'Max has finished his sandwich now and is contemplating a bowel movement'.

The people who don't use it snort and fuss and generally curse it's existence, citing it as the reason society is breaking down, the planet is heating up, and why they never get invited to parties.

The majority of people who have an account and aren't afraid to use it, are British. As we all know, the British don't like to make eye contact with strangers or sit next to them on trains. Unless of course, they've consumed a frothing vat of alcohol, in which case they will hug, kiss, lick, dry hump or assault anybody that happens to enter their blurry line of vision. Does this suggest to anybody else that we are a nation starved of affection, that all we really want to do is reach out and touch somebody, but we're worried we might catch something? And that it's only through numbing our brains and having our faces go a bit wonky that we can gather the courage to express ourselves? To ask for love? And acceptance? And phone numbers?

I think Facebook addresses this need. It's a safe and hygienic way of doing all those things to your friends that your hormones say you need to, but your heritage won't allow. You can poke, slap, spank, spoon, without awkwardness or restrain. Or a hangover for that matter.

She's learned a lot in those eighteen years (although putting the kettle on or dumping laundry anywhere but the floor still remain beyond her capabilities). Here's a brief guide to some of her unquestionable wisdom:

* The stuffed pepper is the most exciting culinary creation since the Dairylea Dunker.

* Dumping your first love for an Italian rogue will result in your entire family turning against you, especially when first love keeps turning up at your house with his mangled heart in his hands, and you tell him you're too busy to see him.

* A mysterious pain in your ribs may well turn out to be an ectopic pregnancy.

* Gaviscon Cool Action is the answer to all your intestinal woes.

* If you want to make your bitter older sisters even more so, strut about in a bikini top displaying your impressive breasts.

* Panicking is not spelled 'pancaking'.

* You will never win an argument with your mother. Others before you have tried, and failed. Let it go.

* Spending other people's money is a great way to save your own.

* If in doubt, have the lasagne.

Mallory Towers for example, was full of female characters doing daft things like having midnight feasts and early morning dips, but there was never so much as a hint of the burgeoning teenage sexuality you see on Hollyoaks. You sort of knew they were all going to get married to a jolly sensible, decent chap and breed labradors, but that's about as far as it got.

So imagine my surprise when, just short of my thirteenth birthday, I developed my first crush. Not on a horse. On a woman.

This woman in fact:

Oh, the confusion! I had thought that when you were twenty one, and had just completed your last term at secretarial college, you were introduced to a young man named Maxwell or Robert, with a side parting and a solid income, who'd also been to boarding school and spent his formative years warming the head prefect's toilet seat and re-filling his tuck box. And that you got married to him, and slept in seperate beds, with frilly pillowcases.

Instead, I become infatuated, obsessesed and generally a little bit weird about Sigourney Weaver. I didn't want to kiss her, or think about her naked (partly because I had no idea what she or any other woman would look like). I just wanted to be with her. Doing what, I don't know.
Playing hockey? Brushing her hair?

I had Gorilla's in the Mist on video, and watched it over and over again until the tape wore out and snapped. I read every interview or article and memorised the details of her life (one daughter, real name Susan etc.) It was...weird.

Of course, once I reached the age where my mum finally gave permission for me to read Just Seventeen, I found out it is PERFECTLY NORMAL OK? for girls to develop feelings for other girls. Or so they claim, for all I know that magazine was edited by lesbians and feminists. No, scrap that, no self-respecting feminist would allow an article on 'what lip gloss best suits your personality' to go to print.

This week I am considering becoming a Gobi toad.

Except I don't think I'd bother with the mating. I'd just nip down the road for a copy of Heat and some strawberry shoelaces, shake the sand out of the duvet and let the cat in.

It was funny, until I realised that, should God not choose to strike me down with scrofula or an errant tree doesn't choose my head to fall upon, well, one of these days, it'll be me. Me and my sister, elbowing each other at the bargain bin and holding up the queue by counting out fistful of coppers, probably with a cat under each arm, and a wheezy dog outside in a shopping trolley.

One of these days, I'll have to struggle into a pair of those pants, whilst trying to stop my teeth from shooting out my mouth, my wig from slipping down my back and my pacemaker from packing in.

Far more achievable than my previous resolutions, which have included taking French A-level, giving up television, transforming the texture of my thighs from dimpled blamange to steely perfection, I dare say.

It would make everything I say sound authoritative, you can imagine a lord of the realm using it to place his breakfast order - 'I'll have the kippers, I dare say', or the queen dismissing her butler - "That will be all, I dare say'.

Being short, semi-blonde, having a fringe which seems to think it's rightful place is over my eyes and a style of dress which has in the past been compared to that of an angry teenager, well, I thought it was time people started taking me seriously.

"10 Marlboro Lights, I dare say!"

"Clean this bloody flat, I dare say!"

Fancy arguing with that?

Hmm, the only teeny, tiny problem with this idea is it's complete incompatibility with real life. It makes the user sound like a pompous twit from the mid-nineteenth century, the kind of person who feels up the maid when she's dusting the parlour, or steps on a beggar's outstretched hand when they pass them in the street.

And a bit mental.

"What time is it, I dare say!"

"Hello, how are you, I dare say!"