I still have a Twitter account that I use to follow a couple of AI artists and the local newspaper. All the screeching political stuff I got rid of by blocking, muting and unfollowing.
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When the pre-Brexit referendum madness was in full flight I was absolutely addicted to the drama. I would follow accounts with the hottest political gossip, eagerly hoovering up the latest outrage and retweeting it to my tiny pool of followers. It got so as I couldn't talk about anything else;
"Did you hear what so-and-so said about free trade? Madness!!" I would drone to whoever was in earshot. But it wasn't just me; everybody was obsessed by the antics of our politicians.
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By the time lockdown happened and Boris Johnson was in charge it kind of reached, like a septic boil, a deeply unhealthy head. I had to step back because I felt on edge all the freaking time, constantly checking my timeline for news updates.
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I culled my follows, cut out everything that sucked joy out of the Twitter experience and, when Electric Space Twat bought the whole thing, closed one of my two accounts.
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The still open account with extremely limited follows shielded me from the deeply unpleasant shitstorm of New Politics Twitter until I started reading posts by a comedy performer that I missed. Unfortunately they are also strongly political and I started seeing the really unpleasant underbelly of the app. My mental health started to wobble with all the crap I was reading.
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So I am officially out from that cesspit. Nazi sympathising, sexual predator supporting billionaires don't get to decide what I want to read. Fuck you, Elongated Muskrat; you're threatening to make it a paid site and hopefully that will finally kill it off. It's the kindest thing isn't it? To put out of its misery something so obviously on its deathbed.

· 11:05 ·

I had wandered into some kind of hippie community based around a windmill in a lake. The whole thing centred around some super creative guy who was an artist, sculptor and a musician In something like the Elephant 6 collective. He was kind of like the Olivia Tremor Control dude. Everyone there worshipped him and rightly so because, despite his really eccentric nature, he was a totally decent guy.
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The people there took pity on me as some poor, out of town, straight, stiff old man, gave me food and drink and chatted happily with me and made me so incredibly welcome that I immediately felt at ease. They asked me if I wanted to join them and I felt so welcome and at home that I immediately said "yes".
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As part of my initiation I had to see Dave Frith. They told me Dave Frith freaked everyone out, so it was ok to be scared. Dave Frith lived in the tall white shade of a table lamp and was coaxed out by some guy hitting it with a long stick. Dave Frith kind of plopped out of the shade onto the shelf and turned out to be some brown cuttlefish-like entity that floated around the base of the table lamp using the frills around his body for movement.
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I laughed and said I thought he was truly excellent, comparing him favourably to one of the fish in our fishtank back home.
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My calm acceptance of Dave Frith apparently did the trick, I was accepted as part of the community. I was given a garlic chicken pie and a party bag of Burger King Whopper flavour Doritos and sent to explore the rest of the site.
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At this point the kaftan wearing Elephant Six dude strode out from his windmill, waded halfway across the lake and proclaimed, in the chest-high water, that we all had to enter the windmill to hear his new album which he had just completed.
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I remarked to the person next to me that my Doritos would get wet and the Elephant 6 guy suddenly became very sarcastic "Oooh, my Doriiiitos!" he cried. At a click of his fingers a giant black Faun appeared and dragged me off to a shed by the side of the windmill. I was not allowed to sit with the commune to hear the music, my punishment was to hear it through the walls of the wooden shed.
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As the music started, the Faun leaned over to me and said "You can come out of the shed and go into the windmill if you perform this one task. You must critique our café." At which point the alarm woke me up.
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I feel a weird sense of loss at how ridiculously friendly, welcoming and judgement-free the commute people were. I guess that kind of ultra-positive openness between a group of people only ever happens in dreams. But it was nice while it lasted.

· 09:06 ·

So that was summer, then. It felt like six whole weeks of Autumnal rain and dark evenings. Now September is upon us and the weather cunningly flips to Summer mode, but with the sad foreshadowing of proper darker evenings, colder mornings, condensation on your early morning car windows and the inevitable approach of the dreaded cold hand of Winter.

· 10:11 ·