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Help! That dodgy bloke is me

A New Year's Eve party had divided into adults downstairs, teenage children upstairs. When the house started to reverberate to thrashed chords on an electric guitar, I went up to tell them to cut it out.

The teenagers were gathered in a girl's bedroom. Not wanting just to stand at the door and yell - and feeling slightly light-headed after charging up three flights of stairs on the best part of a bottle of champagne - I slumped on to the bed and delivered a short lecture on good neighbourliness.

My audience did not seem terribly attentive, a few wandered off, but the guitar was silenced and I went back downstairs. We left quite early as I had to work the next day.

The next morning I logged on to Facebook to see if my friends had posted anything interesting from their new year celebrations. What came up on screen made me spit my coffee all over the keyboard. It was me, and it didn't look good.

How could it? It was from the night before when I was telling the children off. In tartan trousers and a burgundy jacket (it was a party), I was draped across a bed in what was obviously a teenage girl's room.

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In case I didn't look louche enough, someone had added a comment about my seediness and look of dubious intent.

Outrage and panic are a potent combination. Within the hour my son (innocent in all respects) had saved me. He got the picture taken down and even expunged from the camera of the girl who had taken it.

It was still a narrow escape. I had only seen it because when one of your Facebook friends is "tagged" in a photograph on someone else's profile, it comes up on your home page news feed. You might not even know the person who has posted the picture, only that they are known to one of your friends.

This was not the first time something like this had happened. I rang my goddaughter on her birthday a couple of weeks ago. She greeted me with: "Your office party looks as if it was wild."

As the Facebook friend of a junior employee who seems to have spent his evening photographing embarrassing situations, she had seen dozens of pictures of the evening.

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Obviously, it must now be made illegal for anyone under the age of 35 to own a camera.