without breaking

Apart from the sun and the absence of any portable food to take with me it was an ideal morning for a pop round the hill on the way in, heading off the road just before the descent to where Mr Wilmington was perched waiting for some birds to turn up to be photographed after he'd just cooked a few of their relative's eggs.

Back when I was small, you had to ring people on the telephone if you wanted to speak to them, or go round to their house and impose yourself upon them and their families, putting yourself at risk of having to undergo several social interactions. Being me, I found this embarrassing at the best of times. Sometimes, when slightly older, when the default entertainment on Friday evenings was going to a pub and/or lurking around the town we went to school in, rather than suffer the embarrassment of ringing people from my peer group to see if anyone would be out I'd sometimes just turn up and wander round, looking inside the relevant places in case anyone was there, sometimes returning the six miles home after a fruitless wander, occasionally being brave enough to call someone to discover they weren't there or weren't out. Email, as first encountered at uni, made this sort of thing slightly easier, removing the need to make phone calls and providing a means of sort of vaguely staying in touch with people from school. If not for the internet and the primitive IM system I found on the university mail servers in first year I wouldn't have met the people I shared a flat with in second year. Email was at least a form of own-pace communication but it still required knowing people in the first place in order to get their email address. It wasn't until I found out about forums and suchlike that the potential for being able to interact relatively painlessly and normally (for the newly-defined internet value of normal) and to allow onesself to encounter or be encountered by people with similar or dissimilar interests or points of view or whatever without the need to overcome geographical or interaction-initiation-inhibitional barriers became possible, though I still didn't voluntarily attend a meetup of internet people until 2006. I've still yet to initiate one myself, still preferring other people to do the sticking-themselves-out-there thing, but with things like forums and Twitter and suchlike it's now possible for people who still get physically nervous at the very idea of social interaction to sidle up to them without doing anything as ostentatious as committing to attend, being able to check en route that they won't be turning up to find no-one (or the wrong person) there. Without the internet and its disinclination to use face-to-face verbal communication as its default I might, by now, still be less socially incapable than I felt eighteen years ago but it's almost certainly helped.