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Imagine this. When I was planning to go away for a few days last month, this intelligent 22-year-old announced a plan for a party, the guests to include an assorted handful of Internetus who, coming as they would from all corners, would need to stay overnight.
Overnight? In my home, my home that contains everything I care about, rather high on the list being my daughter herself.
She said: "Don't be silly." She said it would be quite all right, because the people she was planning to invite were those whom she had 'known' for at least a year and whom she 'knows' as well as any of her other friends that, on the whole, I tend to like. I said, trying to be reasonable but not altogether succeeding, that in and among the things they 'tell' each other on the tap-tap, a tendency to murder might just have been overlooked, might it not?
The party did not happen. The row most certainly did.
When I say that if they are not nutters they are nerds, she tries to reason. Do I think she is a nerd? Absolutely not. Well, then, why should they be? Do I think she is a liar? Just as absolutely not. Well then.
But I cannot clear it from my head, the worries refuse to go away. It is not that, as individuals, I have reason to believe they would lie. But they could. They could lie about their age, their state of mind or even their sex. Indeed, apparently in America it is common for men to tap-tap pretending to be women on the basis that they then get other women to communicate with far greater intimacy.
A thought occurs. The worst scenes my mind dreams up play like a horror movie. So I call a friend in Hollywood: has anyone thought of this for a movie plot? He laughs. There are five, to his knowledge alone, in development and one heading into production.
So now, I say to my daughter, we just wait for life to imitate art and we're home and dry. And murdered in our beds.
She laughs. "See you in the morning, Mum. I'm just going upstairs to talk to my friends. Goodnight." Tap tappa tap-tap.