As P Diddy (AKA Puff Daddy, Sean Combes, Diddy Dirty Money, MC Deirdre) landed at Heathrow last week, trumpeting the occurrence of his new album and its bacchanalian London launch party, a small smile of Diddy dissent was already playing around my lips.

Diddy's social life, he needs you to know, is much better than yours and mine. His parties, we have gathered via 15 years of his incessant twaddling on ("rapping") about them, are sublime otherworldly affairs. Not for the likes of us. I shall never forget the eight-page leatherbound invite Diddy dispatched in 2002 to his modestly titled bash "The Greatest Party Of All Time" with instructions for Gwyneth, Madonna et al: "Ladies: Hairdos, waxing, manicures and pedicures are a must. Think the Oscars. Think the person you want to marry is inside." I didn't attend this party but can imagine the pressure to pass the hoof and pubic hair length legislation was astonishing.

Of course, back in 2002, Diddy could get away with this level of grandiosity, this being pre-Twitter, pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, pre-the age of the true story of every social event being glaringly and candidly documented for the whole world to inspect. As I monitored Diddy's Dirty Money party last week from the comfort of my sofa while eating Quorn picnic eggs and wearing George of Asda leggings, it was comforting to realise that, in reality, Diddy's nights are just as shambolic as ours. The smoke and mirror trick is over. Nights out, it seems, are sort of the same the whole world over.

As Diddy treated the crowd mean to keep them keen, arriving hours later than planned, his guests were already on Twitter bitching about him. "This is my vision of hell," chirped one poor soul. "The cloakroom queue is three hours long. I wanted to leave an hour ago." "Sober January is rubbish," mumbled another. "Everyone here is dull." Poor Diddy – basically he was Joyce in accounts who'd drawn the short straw of running the party committee. No one had a good word to say about him. Alarmingly Diddy's guestlist was being held to public scrutiny and found sorely wanting. "Shayne Ward, Calum Best and Meg Mathews, WTF? Where are the celebrities?" tweeted one person.

Photos popped up on blogs and links were tweeted of Alan Carr in the VIP area with a bottle of champagne. Accompanying reports said Carr was "stood on a table rapping". Most brilliantly a YouTube clip was posted of Tim Westwood (this generation's answer to Jimmy Savile) making an excruciatingly obsequious speech about how wonderful Diddy was: "Diddy is a king. Diddy invented hip-hop. He invented the sun, the moon, he even invented swingball. Yes Diddy was the first person to spread butter on toast and think: 'This is great, we should call this breakfast!' Make some noise, people, as we all need to thank Diddy for thrusting open the gates of social nirvana and allowing us lesser-gifted, non-broomed Muggles to drink in his splendour!" (OK, I paraphrase, Westwood didn't exactly say this, but please watch the full speech, it makes even less sense.)

I once interviewed the actor Robert Webb from Peep Show and he believed one of his character Jez's strongest traits was Jez's belief in "Cosmic Party Syndrome", ie there's always a better, cooler, hipper party going on somewhere that he can never get to. It's an idea many of us identify with, that undercurrent of vague dissatisfaction that somewhere behind a velvet rope in a VVVIP room there are waxed people with visible collarbones and waspish waists laughing so hard they need flip-top heads. Somewhere, we think, life looks like a Vogue shoot and you're not in the frame, fatty. One of the great things about the explosion of social networking is how the stark truth about life seeps out. Of course people posture and lie on the web, but if you read between the tweets, status updates and photo uploads, a more lumpen, flush-faced, red-eyed, bingo-winged view of life emerges. Poor Diddy, at least he managed to squeeze out a few "legendary parties" before the truth police came knocking.

That said, if the internet had always existed there would have been no stuff of legend ever. The Last Supper would have been documented via a load of blokes passive-aggressively tweeting about Judas. Jesus's speech would be written off as "20.05: @luke pgh self-congratulatory non? bloody hell he goes on. If he's going to go, just go." Quickly followed by: "DM: Shit Luke, that was supposed to be a direct message." Live tweets from Studio 54 would say: "This place smells of horse-shit, why can't that silly Jagger woman just get a cab."

A colleague has dined out for years on the story that she lived in a houseboat in the 70s in Chelsea and Roxy Music used to pop by for parties. I like this mind's-eye imprint of Brian Eno, in full sartorial splendour, picking out the chords of Virginia Plain on the top deck with a Thames wind gently ruffling his mullet. In a way, I'm glad there were no Twitpics of Eno dressed drably trying to unblock the on-board chemical toilet. However, the Diddy Dirty Money party was a joy to stay home and monitor. According to Twitter, Diddy actually had terrible flu that night and really wanted to be in bed resting. Ironically there really was a better, happier world out there for him. Normal people at home in pyjamas watching Question Time were living it.

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