Bloggers - friends or.......?

FORGIVE me bloggers, for I have sinned. It has been almost three months since my last blog post.

To be perfectly honest, work has exploded for me and a lot of it involves sitting at my computer, so blogging has been the last thing on my mind at the end of the day.

The teaching is going really well, so much so that the group I was working for has asked me back for a further four week session, which is great, and the original group I was working with are due to have certs presented to them by the Lord Mayor of Dublin at some stage this month, so I'm chuffed with that.

Plus, I've started seeing someone (see how casually I slipped that in there?) and it's taking up a lot of my time (in a bloody brilliant way) as we're together a lot. It's been two months and is really working out well, we've even talked about a future together. We've just come back from a week's holiday to Wexford (gorgeous mobile home, tiny village, beach on the doorstep) and it was wonderful, HE is wonderful, so again being perfectly honest, I haven't felt like I needed the release of blogging to rant.

As Pure Cork Boy put it "I'm in love, so feck ye". (He's a culchie, hence the 'ye' instead of the more acceptable 'you' - joke joke PCB!)

Speaking of PCB, I had an interesting conversation with him the other night on IM about whether people you meet through blogging, or even those you just read regularly, are friends or just acquaintances. What do you think?

I'm of the firm opinion that fellow bloggers (excluding ones I know in person from pre-blogging days such as Red Mum or Paul from Life and Times of an Irish Emigrant) are not friends. Friends are people you know and love, you've been to their homes, you worry about them, comiserate with them, celebrate with them, are involved with them. Bloggers are....well, no offence, but just folk!

Let me give you an example. Recently I was reading Fatmammycat's blog and saw that she had to have a mole removed because she and the docs were worried about it. Naturally she was worried and as I read I thought 'ah poor thing, that's an awful thing to have hanging over you'. I left a comment comiserating about the Irish health system, turned off my computer and that was it. No offence FMC, you seem like a lovely woman, but I didn't give you a second thought after that. Of course if I read that you were seriously ill or something bad had befallen you, I would think it an awful thing and leave a comment of support...but that would be as far as it would go. I don't know FMC, she is not my friend, nor am I hers. (I don't mean to pick on you FMC, I'm just using you as an example, I'm sure you can take it! Please don't hurt me!)

If however, a friend was having a mole removed, I would be in constant contact, calling and texting, I would visit him or her, arrange to meet them, try to aid their recovery, or just be there for them if they needed me. I'd most certainly think about them while they were going through their rough patch. And that to me is the mark of a friend.

PCB thinks that perhaps there can be friends and then casual friends and he would include bloggers in his casual friend category. He said for example if he was in Dublin he'd certainly give me a shout and some others and see if anyone was about for lunch. And the same if he was in London or wherever and there were bloggers there, he would arrange a friendly lunch, thus, these people are friends.

But to me however, friendship is too important and sacred a thing to have there be anything casual about it. I have a small circle of friends who I can rely on at any time, for anything. After that I have acquaintances, work colleagues, people I just know - but no casual friends. For me there is no such thing, I am quite black and white, either you're my friend with all the trappings that involves, or you're not.

Of course, perhaps you might get chatting to regular readers, perhaps meet them at a blog event and they may turn into friends, people you are close to and start to rely on over the months and years, but in general I don't feel that bloggers, even regular readers, are my friends.

It's just something that interested me, so I thought I'd throw it out there. I remember Twenty posted a while back about there being too much of a love in in the Irish blogging community (or something, I can't find the original Twenty, sorry, don't hunt me down) so I wanted to see what you all think.

Bloggers - friends or......?