Last night I had a clear out of the Facebook history. I had a clear out before Christmas and again just after New Year, and yesterday was clearing out January’s data – the updates, the likes and various social networking baggage.

I’m conscious that this probably breaks some unwritten contract between myself and other users of Facebook in terms of reciprocity and likes.

A couple of times last year I was starting to get frustrated with the way that Facebook worked, and the masses of updates and likes from over the seven years or so that I’d been using it. I was also just unhappy with the distraction of the whole thing. I would disable my account for a day or two and then re-enable it again, use it for a while and then repeat the process. It wasn’t terribly useful or healthy.

After a while I decided to clear out old messages and likes. To be honest, it’s made the whole thing much easier to deal with. There’s never more than a few weeks of updates and it doesn’t feel like there is the trail of hidden and long forgotten updates.

The concern about old updates goes back to the problems with the Labour party a few years ago, when comments and blog posts by Jude were dragged out by certain individuals. You couldn’t have imagined anything more harmless than what she had written, but it was twisted into something much worse than it was. I appreciate that that’s the way that local politics goes, and that any questionable comments that I might have posted would be printed out or saved as screenshots somewhere. However, it felt good to clear them out.

I’ve got a couple of scripts that make the job much easier. Facebook doesn’t want you hiding or deleting old content and so it’s very easy to add stuff, and a pain to remove it.

In cases like this, the Activity Log is your friend. It lists everything on a single page and a bit of javascript can be run to find the drop-down menus and to automatically choose the right options. Most of the stuff I’ve added is first marked as “me-only” on the privacy, and then removed from the timeline.

Some likes, such as public pages are there so that I can follow or get updates about an event, individual or a band. In those cases, I change the settings so that they don’t appear on the timeline.

Also, it’s possible to like an organisation, add them into a list and then unlike them. The updates continue in the list, but the like is no longer registered. It was also possible to do this by finding the correct combination of follow (= yes) and like (= no), but that doesn’t seem to work any more.

Initially, I used Tampermonkey scripts in Chrome, but I’ve come to realise that there are so many odd differences in the pages, that it’s easier to have a bit of javascript that I can paste into the developer console, see which bits break and then re-run them when they work.

The only bit of this that I’m not completely convinced with is scrubbing all the likes from updates that friends have posted. However, I rationalise it by thinking of it as a “policy”. It’s not a great policy, but at least I try to be reasonably consistent.

The whole process isn’t perfect, but it does the job. This also probably makes me sound like one of these lunatics who is paranoid about how FB uses data. I’m not. Most of their data policy makes perfect sense and 99% of it is still there, the only difference is that it’s only visible to me. If the marketing algorithms at Facebook want to trawl my data to see if they should advertise teabags or slimming products to me, then it’s all there for them.

The main thing is that it makes me feel a bit better, a bit lighter, and for me that’s important. I’d rather keep things clear and enjoy the interactions with friends rather than disconnect completely. Nor am I keen on maintaining a “like strike” – refusing to click like on any updates or articles. There is stuff that makes me smile, or I’m pleased for whoever has posted the update – good reasons to click like. The disappearance of that notch a few weeks or months later doesn’t mean that I no longer like it, it just means that things have moved on.

Anyway, that was all last night. Today’s non-work activities have revolved around boiling up and roasting a ham for the half-term lunches and roasting a leg of lamb for dinner. There is something magical about a sandwich filled with slices of a piping hot ham just out of the oven. I think it could even beat a bacon butty – but that’s because I don’t like my bacon crispy.

The leg of lamb was more of a herculean task. I had to stop work at 3pm to start the process for dinner when Jude got home. Then on and off over the next three hours as anchovies and garlic were pushed into the flesh, potatoes were scrubbed and roasted and greens were cooked.

I’d timed the cooking so that I could get out and walk for half an hour between the lamb coming out and standing for a while and the potatoes being ready. I had about two minutes either side which worked a treat. Not the most exciting of walks – down High Lane to the Booths development and then back again, with a one-minute walk past our house and back to make up the 30 minutes.

This turned out to be my 50th consecutive walk since we were in Aylesbury over the New Year. There is a power in doing something every day and then not wanting to “break the chain”. I’ve mentioned the Lift / Coach.me app before and it’s a wonderful tool for these kinds of habits. Anyway, 50 daily walks is only 1/7 of a year (roughly) and so there’s a long way to go yet.

Dinner was tasty, in case you were wondering. Tomorrow will be the Bobotie which is a thing of delicious beauty and wonder. A big mousaka-like lump of meat topped with egg and bacon. It’s our third February Bobotie along with a fourth that we cheated and cooked in the autumn last year. This doesn’t happen often, but it’s one of my favourite recipes and it seems a shame to wait a whole year for it.

This evening I went to the gym for a NROL hypertrophy session. There is a bit of a cheat in my programme where I use an abs wheel which isn’t in the book. However, it’s the closest that I can get to the “push-away”. It’s a tough old exercise, but I’m finally stretching right out and then pulling myself up with this wheel in my hands. My tummy feels like it’s been through the mill when I finish, but that’s probably a good thing.

So day 47 – 3.15km walked and just under an hour at the gym in the evening.