Confession time: I intended to write at least one blog entry over the Christmas holidays. But I couldn’t, because I left the e-mail containing my password in a work account, and since I was at home, er, that wasn’t particularly useful.

What I was going to write about, though, was the exciting news that Facebook has removed the word “is” from its status update box. (Which is now hopelessly out of date, but I’ll plough on regardless.) For the whole two people remaining in the world who don’t use Facebook, I should explain: Facebook allows you to enter a sentence about what you’re doing, thinking or feeling at any gi ven time, so all your friends can read it - kind of like Twitter, on a slightly smaller scale. And until very recently, that update box provided you with the beginning of a sentence - [Your name] is…

Now, though, the ‘is’ has been made optional, rather than compulsory. Now, your status update can incorporate whatever verb you like, without you having to come up with some grammatically torturous way of doing so. I can make my status read “Sarah Dobbs likes Christmas”, rather than, er, “Sarah Dobbs is liking Christmas”, or whatever nonsense I might have come up with, were I feeling particularly incapable of sentencing properly.*

If you’re a Facebook user, there were two appropriate reactions, upon hearing this news. One was “cool!” The other, “meh, whatever.” Bafflingly, though, some contrary types immediately set up a Facebook group demanding the return of the ‘is.’

I know Facebook groups are largely pointless and don’t serve any function other than to kill time, but - seriously? Does not compute.

* No-one reading this will get that reference. It’s obscure, but worth it.