When ordinary people become extraordinary - and unreal

HAVE you ever had that vague feeling that you know people you meet but cannot place them? It happens to me all the time. Especially when I travel. It's not forgetfulness or a case of too many friends. It's something called Facebook.

I live in a wonderful low-density area that is conspicuous for its lack of puffery, preening and posing. It's called Reality. Not many people have heard of it, it seems. Not on Facebook, certainly, where people are morphing into unrecognisable emojis and wide-eyed cartoons that threaten to catapult oversize eyeballs into your soup.

A rash of instant-beauty apps promise to slim waists down to spaghetti strands and elongate fingers into chopsticks at the swipe of a cell-phone slider. They will turn broad, happy, friendly, hard-working faces into taut triangles with pouting mouths and the sort of space-saucer eyes that belong in comic books.