TORCUIL IS ... the status box hovers empty on the screen. I can't decide what mood I'm in or which aspect of my so- called life is worth recording for the benefit of my Facebook friends. I'm suffering status update fatigue. I'm fed up of Facebook, tired of keeping up with the bon mots of my online community. I'm bruised from being poked, more super-walled than a tenement football and appalled at my Pavlovian addiction to the networking site as a substitute for a social life. I want a quiet cyber funeral and to get back to the real world.

Some people will remember 2007 for lousy weather, for Brown or Salmond or Smeatomania. For me and a thousand other media types who sit at a keyboard pretending to work, it was the summer of Facebook and now, thank goodness, it's over.

How much of life was becoming virtual dawned on me when I ran into my Facebook Friend number one (by dint of his surname) at a London opening. We hadn't actually seen each other, face to face so to speak, since we worked in the Glasgow office of this newspaper, oh, half a newspaper lifetime ago. We'd reconnected via a mutual Facebook friend but that was about it. Two swigs of beer later it turns out he lives, wait for it, two streets away from me. We use the same bus stop, buy newspapers in the same shop, yet meet only online. This is when I decided to file for a Facebook divorce from myself.

I'm not alone in predicting the fad coming to an autumnal end. I've noticed others allowing status updates to gather inter-cobwebs. One friend has declared a status update strike and says it might be a very long dispute. This is a welcome antidote to those who, unbidden, relay their daily dietary habits. If I want to read a menu I'll go to a restaurant.

Advertisers are walking away from the site because of infiltration by the BNP, and there was a scare last week when the computer code used to generate Facebook's home and search page was made public. It's over, I tell you, and you'll be glad because it eats up your life.

Facebook reckon that members spend 19 minutes a day on the site, that is unless you work at the BBC where more than half the staff are registered users. To get employees back to work, I hear the corporation is setting up the first UK Facebooks Anonymous group. I would join, weeping bitter tears over all that time I spent typing to my next door Facebook friend when we could have been outside kicking a ball in the park.

It has some redeeming features, like its fundamental honesty and its innate politeness. You can't hide on Facebook and not many people, apart from David Miliband, pretend to be who they're not online.

I used its marketplace feature recently (I have been to every nook and cranny of the damned site) for the most expensive purchase I've ever brokered online. It's all "buyer beware" but I, in the event of being sold a pig in a poke rather than a scooter, at least had the names of several hundred of the seller's friends to embarrass him with, not to mention his girlfriend's picture, the rugby club he was a member of and his favourite films. These bona fides were more reassuring than a star rating from Joe981 that eBay seller OrsonW45 might garner at the online car boot sale.

But the anonymity of the web is one of the more depressing features of the internet age. Try catching up with the future of Scotland on any newspaper readers' forum and you'll end up wanting to take a shower. The flipside of Alex Salmond's "big conversation" on the constitution is like wading through slurry on a foot-and-mouth infected farm yard.

Online, the debate is swamped by the "Wha's like us" faction of nationalism that brooks no criticism o' the oppressed Scots nation and does its best to engage in the most derogatory language possible, anonymously and preferably in a Scots accent. It's the online equivalent of being sat blindfolded in a Lochgelly pub on a wet October night with 15 bar-room bores talking simultaneously.

You begin reading a string in the hope it's penned by teenagers with a loaded sense of irony. Midway you cling to the notion of a clever, single-scripted satire but finish in the depressing knowledge that the authors are serious and beyond parody.

This army of cyber woads is tireless. Look at the timings, they hover around newspaper websites at midnight competing to be first to hurl abuse at whatever a political editor has laid out for them.

A generation ago, Scottish local newspapers were notorious for elevating the poison pen letter to an art form, printing vile allegations on letter pages under nom de plumes or "name and address withheld". In print, most have cleaned up their act but that hasn't drained the peatbog, the Pantone 300 ink brigade has been reborn online.

When I read online comments on the London or indeed Californian newspaper sites contributors sound informed and even courteous to each other. Why is online Scotland cursed by kilted keyboards with cyber Tourette syndrome where serious debate is reduced to how much you can make yourself read like a bad imitation of a James Kelman character?

One of my friends (not a Facebook devotee) has a remedy. When the playground bile gets to boiling point she posts a comment to stall traffic. She just types: "Do you boys not have girlfriends?" It shuts them up, until they remember that online no-one can see how empty your life is.