Superheroes don't all wear capes

Picture: Kingston Hospital

Some 16 months ago I was in a room a few minutes’ walk away from the one in which I’m writing this, ruminating on the amazing “pit crew”, as I called them, working on my necrotic foot. That was my first in-patient stay in a hospital for almost 30 years (the only previous occasion being for a relatively cosmetic procedure). But framed in the context of the politics of the NHS, and the-then rampant pandemic in April last year, I wrote of my singular, emboldened appreciation of the healthcare profession and all who work within it (Postcard from the cuckoo’s nest).

Today, however, I’m in our local A&E department for a different reason: the treatment of my 92-year-old mother after she had a fall at home. This is the same A&E unit I came to with my diseased foot, thinking at the time that I’d just be given a bandage and some antibiotics and sent on my way. In the end, I remained at this hospital for three and a half weeks. On this occasion, my mother is propped up on a bed in a bay directly opposite the one I was assessed in, prior to being admitted for that lengthy stay. That, too, was a Saturday lunchtime. 

As we sit there, waiting for something to happen, someone to come by and do something else, my admiration for all those working in this environment continues undimmed. This is, though, supposed to be the crucible, the epicentre of crisis. Every day our newspapers scream of meltdowns in the health service, of dysfunction and inefficiency throughout. And while that may be true elsewhere, my mum was ambulanced to hospital within an hour of her carer calling 999.

While A&E processes and procedures take time, as nurses and nursing assistants comprehensively evaluate my mother, taking blood samples and blood pressure readings, and occasionally carting her off for a CT scan, things are reassuringly relaxed. For now. On the basis of the prevailing media depiction of our hospitals, you’d expect to encounter a scene akin to the Do-Lung Bridge in Apocalypse Now!. Instead, the staff are calm and supremely professional. There is some noise - you’d expect the occasional scream in an emergency department - but there is mostly a low-level hubbub as staff go about their duties. In the middle of the large room with 15 treatment bays is a central IT hub, where junior doctors and other staff clack away at computer keyboards, analysing test results, X-rays and medical records, all part of the ultra-digitised health service. It all looks so joined up, but the reality - I speak from experience - is that while some parts are connected, others need a kick (for the post-hospital treatment of my foot, I had to join the dots myself between my GP, the hospital outpatient team and the local podiatry function).

Occasionally, the hubub is raised a tad by a patient call button being pressed in another part of A&E, resulting in a dull beep that, too, gets tuned out along with all the rest of the background noise. This being a Saturday afternoon, the unit doesn’t appear overwhelmed, but there are plenty of customers: - gardening accidents, a couple of people with clear symptoms of dementia, and so on. In an adjacent bay to my mother’s, a police officer stands watch over a young man, not giving anything away as to whether the patient is a victim or a perpetrator of some Friday night criminality. At various points in the day, the one constable will be joined by three colleagues. Their two police cars are parked outside. At a time where the political mood is intensifying on getting police back out on the street to prevent or solve crimes, the sight of four officers and two patrol vehicles tied up for most of a Saturday both suggests the seriousness of the situation, and also reminds you of how resource-stretched the Met is.

Moreover, the longer we sit here - my wife and I watching our phone batteries ebb away (until we discover the ability to rent a Joos charger for £3 - ker- and, indeed, -ching) - the more you start to see our NHS under pressure. The ambulances are coming in thick and fast as Saturday afternoon gives way to Saturday evening. A second set of police officers appear, looking after another admission.

At the time of writing we’ve now been here ten hours. Somewhere between 7pm and 8pm there appeared to be a change of shifts. As one nurse hands over to another, staffing becomes thinner. A new pair of nurses take over the entire ‘Majors’ area (one of three - the others being ‘Resuss’ and a dedicated A&E unit for children), requiring us to tell my mother’s story all over again. By now, two doctors have seen her, and then the senior duty consultant , who thankfully concludes that she won’t need to be kept in overnight, and that her fall was most likely caused by her getting out of bed too quickly. ‘More haste, less speed’, was a mantra my dad drilled into me. I don’t think my mother was listening.

So the good news is that we should be taking Mum home, but there are still more repeat tests to perform to satisfy someone that she’s OK to do so. To be honest, we’re not sure why, and nor do the evening nurses. At some point we note to them that, apart from a couple of biscuits with a cup of tea, and some of the contents of the picnic we’d been planning to take to a seaside airshow when we got the call to come back to south-west London, she hasn’t actually eaten anything substantial all day. This is eventually rectified by a microwaved roast dinner rustled up for her. We make do with coffee from the last service of the day from the on-site branch of Costa.

And so, as hour gives way to hour, the crosswords from the newspaper my mother had with her completed or dispensed with out of boredom, our phones restored with yet another expensive battery rental, we’re all beginning to stare into space. Mum’s discharge seems no closer. No one seems to say why. It takes a firm conversation with one of the nurses to get some clarity, eventually.

Here, then, is a summer Saturday night in a major A&E department. The central hub is now down to a couple of duty junior doctors, with just the two nurses, despite all the visible bays still containing the patients who’ve gradually come in throughout the day. The nursing assistants - those vital components of hospital life, are even fewer. Not that they’re taking it easy: one, who was looking after my mother, was on Day 6 of her roster, and even that was voluntary - she normally worked in another part of the hospital. She’d also only just returned to work after spending two years battling breast cancer.

This is where you simply can’t be critical. Yes,the system creaks, and in some places is actually falling apart. But Saturday’s experience, even if it resembled an episode of Seinfeld (“a show about nothing”), underlined further the addage that not all superheroes wear capes. Some just wear blue scrubs.

I’ve spent a fair amount of time, now, in hospitals and medical facilities as a result of my diabetes. All of that time, you could say, is self-inflicted (I’m Type 2). But my experiences - save for my inpatient stay last year - have been relatively fleeting. A test here, a consultation there - “maintenance”, as my wife calls it. What you never appreciate fully is just what else goes on under the skin. The tempo of this particular metropolitan emergency department on a Saturday has appeared calm, but that’s just the professionalism protecting reality. For the patient - in this case a lady of 92 - it’s bewildering and exhausting. You can’t help but feeling that she is receiving the best care possible, but it takes time to administer. If her son and daughter-in-law hadn’t been around to ask, would she have been able to get a meal, help with her ablutions, or even an update on what was going on?

With every encounter with a health professional, and especially one working within the NHS, you must feel admiration. Admiration for taking on one of society’s lower-paid jobs, one where you literally and figuratively have to put up with strangers’ shit with stoic professionalism. Occasionally, you have to deal with less successful outcomes than ours. Here’s where fiction and reality separate dramatically: if your only idea of life in a medical environment is one of those slick dramas on TV, especially the American ones, like Grey’s Anatomy, life-or-death situations are not resolved in 50 minutes. Modern hospitals are stuffed to the gills with state-of-the-art technology, but in real life - in the UK at least - there’s no team of highly remunerated hotshot surgeons ready to leap in with every emergency case the ambulances bring to the door. There is just “a” team, mostly of young, foreign professionals working twelve-hour shifts, triaging the unfortunate, the drug-addled, the dementia stricken and, in the case of my mother, the elderly. It’s a miracle our hospitals don’t collapse at all. 

The relative calm we experienced for the better part of ten hours masked, I suspect, the real horror going on in the NHS nationwide. And while it was far from perfect, it was a further reminder of the reassurance that, for good or bad, this most jewelled of British institutions, and it’s dedicated people, is there when you need it.

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It was no less a political analyst than Bruce Springsteen who called it in 2016: “The trouble at the moment is you have Donald Trump, who is talking about rigged elections,” he told Channel 4 News, prophetically before the-then presidential candidate returned to his obsession with rigged elections four years later. Springsteen goes on in the interview to predict that Trump would lose. He clearly got that wrong, but it was his next statement that struck home then as it does now with even more purchase: "He's such a flagrant, toxic narcissist that he wants to take down the entire democratic system with him if he goes."

“Toxic narcissist.” Two words that perfectly capture the man who became the 45th President of the United States, and when he did, subjected us to four years of unrelenting madness. You can decide for yourself whether this was real insanity or a form of eccentricity, but madness it has mostly resembled from the get-go, from the all-caps rants via Twitter to the endless revolving door of firings and hirings of cabinet secretaries and key staffers, plus the fanbase-bating dog whistles towards targets as varied as Mexico, Europe, China and even the UK’s “Muslim problem”. 

To his defenders, he’s been a breath of fresh air. “Drain the swamp,” he promised, as he took on Washington’s institutional culture and the mainstream “fake news” media (i.e. any outlet who didn’t sycophantically provide ra-ra for him). Week in, week out, day in, day out, the  “Me! Me! Me!”  tweets and self-regarding speeches have been endless. Quite what Trump actually achieved over these last four years in office is, actually, hard to ascertain. Jobs - at least until the pandemic - are up, they say. The economy - at least until the pandemic - is up, they say. The populist view is that America never had it so good, they say. History will judge.

Picture: Channel 4 News

Later in his Channel 4 interview, Springsteen added the following to his appraisal by saying how Trump was so unreflective: “He simply has no sense of decency, no sense of responsibility about him. The words that he’s been using over the past several weeks really are an attack on the entire democratic process. I think it’s very dangerous. He does have a lot of people’s ears, and I don’t think he’s going to go quietly, gently into the good night, I think he’s going to make as big a mess as he can, and I don’t know what that’s going to mean, but we’ll find out shortly.” Well, fast forward four years, and we are where we are. Tomorrow Trump will leave the White House, board Marine One and chopper out to Andrews Air Force Base. From there he’ll fly to his own Camelot, Mar-a-Lago, the sprawling but surprisingly modest golf resort in Florida that will presumably be the bunker in which he plots his next move. It's anyone's guess as to what that will be, even if we can optimistically hope for a period of quiet reflection out of the spotlight. Donald Trump, we have seen over these last four years, doesn’t do quiet reflection.

What he does leave behind is a ruptured America, scarred by the events on Capitol Hill and fearful for what might happen now. And well they might be, when you see scenes of heavily armed militiamen, like the 'Boogaloo Boys' roaming city streets with a staggering belligerence. This is not Mogadishu or the lawless reaches of Afghanistan, Syria or Iraq. No, we're talking about streets in the world’s biggest economy and its most powerful democracy. In fact, right now, there are more American soldiers in their nation’s capital city than currently in Afghanistan, Syria and Iraq combined. That might be overblown precaution, but then it’s clear that the attack on the Capitol had been strongly hinted at beforehand by chatter on the Dark Web, so a chastened law enforcement establishment will not want to make the same mistake again before tomorrow’s inauguration.

The scenes outside and inside the Capitol on 6 January filled me with genuine sadness. I’ve spent more time in the United States as a visitor than any other country, spending annual holidays and long weekends there, visiting for work and even living there for two years. In fact, I was at home in California during 9/11, the last time the country felt genuinely afraid, but which rallied in the ashes of the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. 9/11 showed America at its most resilient. Trump has shone a light on America at its most divided. 

He was always going to be an unconventional president, but that, going back four years, would have been a polite way of calling it. Twitter comes in for a lot of attention, but then, rightly so. It’s been his medium of choice. Rather than use conventional presidential mouthpieces, the 140 character limit (later raised to 280) provided unbridled access to his audience. At first it was even amusing: the actual Donald Trump (emphasised by the @realDonaldTrump handle) tweeting, not a team of millennial social media hotshots with Harvard degrees. No, the prez himself, from his very own iPhone, and often at a time of day when many assumed he was sat on the Shanks Vitreous, performing his morning ablutions as he ripped into individual opponents, institutions and topics that raised his ire. This daily, diarrheic river would drive the narrative of the next 48 months or so.

But, even if you regard this as eccentricity or, merely, an unconventional leader at work, another view emerges that goes beyond egomaniacal craziness. Eight months after he was sworn in, Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote an excoriating profile, questioning whether he was, in fact, really all there. It was fascinating and frightening. Taibbi’s conclusion was that President Trump had become a very difficult personality to Donald J. Trump, celebrity property developer and reality show host. Irrationality, Taibbi argued, was, on some level, working for him. Until last November’s election result, the daily madness just became par for the course, the Twitter rants more tiresome, the firings and hirings monotonous, and even the brain farts about foreign targets (e.g. “Rocketman” Kim Jong-Un) sinister bluster. Somewhere along the way, however, we’ve gone from a Johnny Rotten figure saying “Boo!” for shock effect, to the apparent marshal of an insurrection. Trump’s leadership since the election has looked more like that of a cult chief, desperate even, with his “stolen election” rhetoric, blatant untruths and conspiracy theories, and even the hectoring of Georgia’s Secretary of State by phone. 

6 January seemed to be the final act. In hindsight, that rally in front of the White House now resembles an effective call to arms, Trump's very own Agincourt speech. The loud post-election grumbling about votes and other apparent injustices - the repeat cycle of 2016's theme - escalated to the point that Trump was now the leader of a fully mobilised militant cult. His  tacit endorsement of the extreme component of the audience assembled on Pennsylvania Avenue, fuelled by Rudy Giuliani’s call for “combat”, lit the blue touch paper. The crowd that stormed the Capitol had more than a wild staring eyed nature about their zeal. One pony-tailed backwoods type who leered into a television camera even resembled Dennis Hopper’s whacked-out photographer in Apocalypse Now (“Hey, man, you don't talk to the Colonel. You listen to him. The man's enlarged my mind. He's a poet warrior in the classic sense.”). Trump as Colonel Kurtz? It's not that ridiculous.

The Capitol insurrection might not yet be the final act: the 20,000 National Guard troops, augmented by Secret Service special forces and a beleaguered police, are still expecting more, and even worse. Trump's final day in office is unfolding, and with it the potential for further mayhem, not least of which, the pardoning of hundreds - something in the president's gift - that could even include the president himself. Even this adds further to the exhaustion we’ve all been suffering from. I actually stopped following Trump on Twitter a while ago, as it was actually affecting my mental health. But now, in theory, it’s over. 

Whether you think Joe Biden will be a good president or not, we can’t have anything worse. Regardless of your politics, America was, mostly, doing fine until Trump came along. To return to the punk theme, that musical movement came along, briefly made some noise, shook the tree a little, and then things returned to normal. Trump as America's first punk president? Not so wild an idea. But instead of presenting a refreshing alternative, he's left a legacy of division, drawing out demons that have always been there, but thankfully had been kept hidden. Brexit had a similar effect here, and comparisons between what happened in Washington and the murder of MP Jo Cox shouldn’t go unnoticed.

The way forward, however, is now partly in Biden's hands, and partly in the hands of a Republican Party that made a Faustian pact with Trump to acquire power. Even if the Congressional impeachment vote last week showed a resilient latent support for Trump within his own party, the sentiment more broadly is that he’s a spent force, and a toxic one, too. If an impeachment trial in the Senate does render him unfit for any further public office, thus denying Trump a tilt at the 2024 vote, the party will have to move on and reflect. Right-wing fanaticism, however, didn’t end in April 1945 with a self-applied bullet in the Führerbunker. Acolytes of that particular strain have festered ever since, as Arnold Schwarzenegger's impassioned video the other week drew necessary comparison to.

Like it or not, Trump hasn’t gone for good. Even if he does choose to spend his time now trying to fix his ailing business empire or just playing a lot of golf, the Senate impeachment trial will keep him and his cult firmly in the spotlight. The madness is not quite over. Perhaps, though, America will be given the chance to heal, and return to the kind of political discourse led by intelligent reason, and not the ravings of a glorified bar room braggart, a Homer Simpson character perched on a stool in Moe's Tavern, giving forth his views on anything that enters his noggin.

As Twitter turns 10, is the Twittocracy out of control?

In comparison to the world that exists in the comment sections of online articles of the Daily Mail, the 'mood slime' oozing through New York City in the Ghostbusters films is relatively benign.

Should you make the fatal mistake of going to the Mail Online for anything other than its excellent sports coverage, and you then click on a story - really, any story - you will be, at a glance, rewarded with the most frightening representation of modern society. It is one which makes Faustian visions of the underworld look beatific. It will remind you of Jack Crawford's advice to Clarice Starling in The Silence Of The Lambs: "Believe me, you don't want Hannibal Lecter inside your head", such is the insanity let loose in these forums.

The Daily Hate is where the unmoderated go to dispense their batshit-crazy opinions, their apalling spelling and even worse grammar (be warned if easily offended by "your" instead of "you're"), and their utterly noxious views on celebrities that have just appeared in a miasma of covert bikini pictures (supported, as the paper's 12-year-old caption writers invariably write, by descriptions of "a leggy display" or "a busty display", or pointing out "plenty of side boob" and its escapist cousin "under boob"), and to generally contribute to a seeping wound of unsolicited bile about people they would never otherwise be able to engage the world at large with directly.

Twitter/Danny Baker

The simple solution, of course, to taking umbrage at this somewhat unsolicited and mostly anonymous bile is to not "go directly to comments", as appears to be the activity name for people who see one of the newspaper's crackpot headlines (such as one once hilariously announcing that Goebbels was paranoid about Adolf "Hotler" - HOTLER! - sleeping with Frau Goebbels) and make straight for the veritable cuckoo's nest below the main story.

In this regard, the Mail is rather like Australia. Knowing, as you do, that throughout its landmass and coasts lurks most of the world's things that will kill you, you are empowered with the knowledge and good sense to avoid it. By the same token, you know that anything directed by M. Night Shyamalan will render you in need of clean underwear, and anything with Mrs. Brown's Boys in the title will leave you reaching for the will to live. So the Mail's readers forum, and indeed the Mail itself, is put sensibly off limits.

Twitter, however, is another matter. Depending on your popularity - and, face facts, it is your perceived popularity that determines this - you are completely at the mercy of the world. Twitter is like actually visiting Australia and spending your entire time naked as the day you turned out, coated in honey, while attending a meeting at the corporate HQ of the entire wasp species before scheduling a restorative dip later in the country's tiniest body of water known to harbour crocodiles. Who haven't dined in months.

This may sound a tad over-dramatic, but there have been times - moments of idleness you could characterise them - when I have been drawn to individuals' tweets and then gone crashing foolishly into the "conversations" that have either preceded them or come afterwards.

A recent example concerns Al Murray, a figure known to British audiences, mainly, as the ironic 'Pub Landlord', a standup comedy character based on the boorish, right-wing UKIP-loving barkeeps who, like Londom black cab drivers, will opine on many things that get liberals hot under the collars of their hair shirts.

Whether in character or not, Murray - an Oxford-educated descendent of the 3rd Duke of Atholl and a great-great-great-great-grandson of the novelist William Thackeray - appears to take great delight in engaging Twitter fascists to the extent that you actually see their little rubber bands going snap. It is an art, and an intelligent one, and one in which - credit where due - Murray will march straight into his own online Agincourt without so much as the blindest concern for his own safety. A recent engagement by Murray on the not-too-light topic of anti-semitism was like watching Jason Bourne take down allcomers in an alley, except even now I can't recall who was fighting whom about what, largely because it was a Saturday night and I was in decent supply of gin, tonic and ice cubes.

Another admirable troll jouster is Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for the Birmingham consituency of Yardley. I mention Phillips not out of any political affiliation, but as an example of how Twitter has gone too far in giving people an unbridled voice. In October last year, Phillips appeared in a House of Commons meeting to discuss a debate about International Men's Day. "As the only woman on this committee, it seems like every day to me is International Men’s Day," she commented. "When I’ve got parity, when women in these buildings have parity, you can have your debate. And that will take an awfully long time."

Cue the River Styx itself breaking its banks, with Phillips facing threats of rape - yes, rape. On the one hand, you can rationalise it by saying that such people use the anonymity of Twitter as their shield. But on the other hand, you have to recognise that someone capable of making such a threat could also live right next door.

I really have very little interest in or regard for politicians (who are largely self-serving egos on legs, sorry), but in Phillips I genuinely admire her integrity to speak freely and with authority (her recent brouhaha comparing New Year's sexual assaults in German with an ordinary night in in Birmingham had the sound basis of Phillips having worked closely with womens' abuse charities). Quite understandably, on this occasion she lost her sense of fun: "No internet today. Being told that 'I asked for it' regarding threats to rape me is not fun. Its not 1st time in my life I've heard it." she tweeted, adding: "Today my son is 7. I'm glad he is not old enough to go on internet and find all the people threatening to rape me."

Most of the nonsense Phillips puts up with on Twitter is deflected with good humour. But on this occasion, lines were crossed. This, of course, raises the question about why anyone would want to put their head in the proverbial lion's mouth on a platform as public as Twitter when such swivel-eyed, foil hat-wearing lunacy lurks predatorially in the bushes. Least of all celebrities. There are many questions one might ask of Lindsay Lohan for posting lascivious pictures of herself on Instagram, but is there any - any - justfication for members of the populace to openly call her a "junkie whore", just because there's a button beneath her post that allows you to write something?

As with the Mail, looking up replies to celebrity tweets can be a frightening, faith-in-humanity-sapping experience. I'm very serious when I say that you simply should avoid them. Because you will wonder what sort of society we live in. You will question what absence of civility allows people the belief that even with their Twitter identity completely unguarded, and their name and profile photograph on show, they can say anything to anyone, let alone the famous, via this passive-aggressive medium than they would have the bollocks to say to their face?

For those of us in the communications game, Twitter - unlike Facebook - has been a boon. Companies and corporates have leapt upon it for its instantanious immediacy. Celebrities have embraced it in a way that, as someone who used to court the PRs of the famous, I find quite refreshing.

There are many celebs out there who do Twitter just right: Gillian Anderson, an actress who by my book can do no wrong, is one of the funniest celeb tweeters out there, especially when she's baiting David Duchovny.

But even she can't put out something of genuine interest to her fans without some dipshit tweeting something juvenile to her. So is it right that they can, or should "@GillianA" just ignore the serious invasions of her public image that she often has to put up with?

My point here is that in the olden days our contact with the famous was strictly controlled by their publicists. We only knew what they were saying or thinking because a journalist, or a magazine or a TV interviewer had been granted annointed access to the schleb, and even then under some threat of violence, or worse, if agreed terms of reference were breached.

Now, we don't have to wait for showbiz hacks to describe the mood of a Hollywood star as they wilt from that day's umpteenth interview. Because, thanks to Twitter, we know that Johnny Famous isn't the surly hack-hating git an interview might portray him as, because he's just tweeted a Vine of his cat doing something cute, leaving us under no misapprehension that JF is, actually, normal and a bit of a laugh in real life.

Sometimes, however, it works against them. Stephen Fry has been, without doubt, one of the most prolific users of Twitter and one of its earliest celebrity proponents. However, he has also fallen vulnerable to its darker side, and has taken himself off it three times in sensitive reaction to twiterverse reactions to things he's said and done, including last month's BAFTAs when do-gooders thought he'd caused genuine offence by describing costume designer (and, actually, close friend) Jenny Beavan as "a bag lady".

Despite stressing his longstanding friendship with Beavan and that he was indulging in nothing more than joshing, Fry closed down his account on February 15 following a night of trench warfare with people accusing him of mysoginy and worse. In a post on his personal blog entitled "Too many people have peed in the pool", Fry wrote that he hadn't so much slammed the door on Twitter as "stalked off in a huff throwing my toys out of the pram as I go", adding "It’s quite simple really: the room had started to smell. Really quite bad."

He described Twitter's early halcyon days as "a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest", noting how "we chattered and laughed and put the world to rights and shared thoughts sacred, silly and profane. But now the pool is stagnant. It is frothy with scum, clogged with weeds and littered with broken glass, sharp rocks and slimy rubbish. If you don’t watch yourself, with every move you’ll end up being gashed, broken, bruised or contused. Even if you negotiate the sharp rocks you’ll soon feel that too many people have peed in the pool for you to want to swim there any more. The fun is over."

Of course, Twitter remains what it is to its 300-plus million active users. But Fry does have a point, if a tad melodramatic, when he said "Let us grieve at what Twitter has become, a stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended – worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know. It’s as nasty and unwholesome a characteristic as can be imagined...the tipping point has been reached and the pollution of the service is now just too much."

Ending his post by quoting Martin Luther King ("I am free, free at last"), Fry left no one in any doubt that he was glad to be rid of a beast which he, in some part, helped to build. When I joined Twitter in February 2009, it was because celebrities like Fry and Jonathan Ross had been raving about it. And, yes, part of the attraction was indeed the somewhat voyeuristic proximity with which it brought us mere mortals to the famous.

But there is a genuine argument that, with Twitter, you had to be careful what you wished for. In the ten years to the day since Jack Dorsey sent his first tweet, it has brought about a global emancipation, even if - as an early market research study found, it is still predominantly split between a predominance of "pointless babble", conversations, items of interest, self-promotion, spam and news.

Unless you hold a position of great prominence, you can tweet in the manner to which the concept was born - 'microblogging', which to all intents and purposes means "stream of consciousness". It can be funny: got a good joke? Tweet it. You won't even be bothered by the tumbleweed blowing through your timeline as you get zero likes or an absence of retweets. And then again, you get lucky and your under-the-influence bon mot about the Eurovision Song Contest gets launched into orbit and the retweet count goes berserk.

Twitter does put you out there. If you're prepared to commit yourself to the Twittersphere, be prepared for unsolicited reactions. I admit to have indulged in a little light trollery myself recently when Lord (Alan) Sugar tweeted his barmy idea that José Mourinho got himself fired deliberately because he wanted out of Chelsea.

I was prompted - pint in hand, it must be said - to repost his tweet with the comment that it was "either the dumbest theory since Mourinho said he could revive [Radamel] Falcao's career, or Lord S is on to something". This then prompted Sugar - who doesn't suffer fools gladly at all (and manages his own tweets accordingly) to reply "Shut up". And, I think, he blocked me.

You can't blame him. However, here began the beginning of a painful afternoon. Retweets of my post, comments to it, comments to his retort - Sugar and I were dragged unwillingly into other people's personal dramas. It very soon became the worst 'reply all' nightmare you could muster. Three days on, like remote outposts returning their ballot boxes, comments, retweets and likes were still appearing like random aftershocks, all from what I'd thought was a measured piece of smart-arsery, albeit from the relaxed confines of the saloon bar.

And that is how it happens. I would still maintain that my banter with Sugar was just that, and he is more than grown up enough to not take offence (in fact my exchange was quite mild in comparision to his baiting of Piers Morgan...). But such is Twitter's openness that there isn't much between light ribbing and the kind of wholesale billiousness the likes of Jess Phillips and Stephen Fry have endured. And there's worse, much worse. In fact, there are times when Twitter emulates the darker spaces of the Internet with some of the exchanges people become embroiled in, of a breed that makes the Mail Online's comment sections look as serene as a summer's day on the Serptentine.

Working as I do in corporate media relations, I recognise that social media has its boundaries. Even though anyone in a position of responsibility will make clear "views are my own" in their account bio, you can never, ever cross a line. Even my invariably grumpy missives about Chelsea, written within Guinness-sweetened distance of the pub's big screen, must submit to the social media breathalyser before I commit them to the general public.

It's called self-restraint, something clearly lacking in the nefarious ocean that bubbles just below the apparent freedom of speech Twitter provides. Before the age of social media, I'm sure people led more civil lives. Nutters who wrote to newspapers or public figures would do so in green ink (this is not a myth, by the way) but there was moderation, not to mention a good deal more respect at large. Now, there are no such screens.

The Internet has democratised society, but there are occasions when you wonder whether it has become overly emancipated. And in the process, you do wonder who who - or what - is lurking out there...and possibly only next door.