Not waving but typing

I knew this was going to happen. No sooner do I announce that I’m taking a blogging sabbatical when I suddenly get my mojo back; although to be honest I hesitated in writing this post because the subject matter is so sad. It’s about 14-year-old Kayleigh Lawrie, who died when a car driven by a drunk friend of her father went off the road in Lincolnshire, shortly after she’d updated her Facebook status: “I think I’m going to die. xx. luv you all”. It’s just such a 21st-century story, the collision of technologies, digital banality versus analogue brutality, Mark Zuckerberg meets JG Ballard head-on. Five decades ago or so people wanted to live fast, die young and leave a beautiful corpse. Now all we have is the unutterable pathos of those two lower-case kisses.