“Cullum deserves special mention, because he’s particularly odious – an oily sickening worm-boy, presumably grown in a Petri dish specifically for appearances on middle-of-the-road chat shows like this. 

Swear to God, if I have to see this gurning little maggot clicking into faux reverie mode ever again…I’m going to rise up myself and kill everybody in the world. Starting with him and ending with me…” –  Charlie Brooker, The Guardian,  May 2004  

In 2010, Charlie Brooker stopped writing his Screen Burn column after over a decade of verbally flaying presenters, actors and plain old boorish boobs who’d bounced onto reality TV. He wrote a lengthy mea culpa that simultaneously rescinded all those insults and revelled in them. Why did he switch off the tap of 100% proof bile that had propelled him to fame? Ultimately because he is on telly now and frequently bumps into the very people he used to pick on. Hell, he’s married to a TV presenter. 

I wonder if Brooker would ever have developed that hyper-aggressive style if the targets of his rage had been able to reply instantaneously from the start. Twitter didn’t exist when Brooker was penning TV Go Home, the caustic parody TV listings that help lift him to the high table at The Guardian, becoming that paper’s devil-eyed sayer of the unsayable. An angry letter or email is a far cry from a tweet fired off minutes after your column has gone live. 

The quote at the top of this post is from a piece Brooker wrote about Parkinson. The very presence of Jamie Cullum on the show led him to penning a murderous fantasy where his killing spree ends with the jazz man “sealed in a barrel and kicked into the ocean”. Six years later, after his damascene conversion to the joys of a well-stocked green room and a nice fruit platter, Brooker said: “Jamie Cullum strikes me as a harmless, twinkly-eyed, happy sort of chap”. 

In that same piece, atoning for his decade long imaginary killing spree through the ranks of light entrainment and reality TV fodder, Brooker recalls reading an interview with Jamie Cullum “in which he seemed cheerily bemused as to what he’d done to provoke such fury”. I have an interest to declare at this point: I wrote the press biography for Jamie Cullum’s record The Pursuit. In the process of doing that I interviewed him twice and was struck by just how goddamn nice he is. Before that, I like Brooker (though less aggressively), had joked about the friendly jazz hobbit. 

But once I got to know the human being, the idea of making cheap cracks about him became difficult to imagine doing. For a start, he doesn’t deserve them. He’s a talented bloke who’s worked hard to do a job he enjoys. Seeing him heckled at Glastonbury when he appeared with Spinal Tap at the request of Harry Shearer was an unpleasant experience. Why did certain sections of the crowd seem to believe that his brief appearance playing bass was some kind of tolerated stage invasion? 

Perhaps because columnists like Charlie Brooker have long delighted in saying unpleasant things about Jamie Cullum. Those statements might seem like passing slights but the sentiment lingers and comes together over time, feeds a certain sort of troll that likes to take those harsh words a little bit further. They’re the ones that forward tweets to people just to stir the pot and turn up at gigs to heckle. 

Since he sloshed salve on the Screen Burn, Charlie Brooker has discovered a rather high horse to dispense his wisdom on the horror of crowds and the insults they peddle. A notable example was his column on the response to Rebecca Black’s Friday. He was right about how horrific some of the comments directed at a 13-year-old girl were but two paragraphs of that piece showed a startling lack of self-awareness: 

“Many tweeters end up performing their opinions, theatrically overstating their viewpoint to impress their friends. Just like newspaper – but somehow even worse because there’s no editor to keep their excesses in check or demand a basic level of wit or ability. 

And unlike columnists, they often aim their comments at an individual by addressing their username directly: the equivalent of texting hate mail straight to their phone. I’ve never understood the mentality behind this, but then I write to entertain crowds, not harass individuals.” 

Charlie Brooker made his career from performing his opinions, theatrically overstating his viewpoint to entertain his readers. Unlike many tweeters who have extremely small audiences, his funny but brutal critiques of people’s physiques (Saskia from Big Brother had a “face that could advertise war”) were published to an audience of hundreds of thousands. 

Brooker addressed the individuals he joked about directly, he simply did it in print and on a massively popular website. The difference was that The Guardian name gave his words legitimacy and offered a kind of barrier from subjects. There are lots of people on Twitter who are as funny as Charlie Brooker, they’re just publishing their thoughts at the wrong point in history to benefit from the platform he had. 

I use Twitter to make jokes about people on TV and in public life all the time. Some people think they’re funny. Others don’t. The crucial difference from the halcyon days of Screen Burn, when Charlie Brooker could fantasise about brutally murdering popular recording artists or imagine reality TV contestants as foul animals, is that the subjects of my scorn can reply to me immediately and directly. On Twitter, we are all stood in the same massive room and my whispers in the corner can easily reach the ear of someone sat at the top table. 

@-ing someone into a joke about them is the web equivalent of knocking on their door and shouting “twat” in their face. I’ve never done that and I never will. But plenty of people do and they’ll also take something you’ve written about someone on TV and forward it to them, either as a way of being cruel to that person or as an attempt to get you in “trouble”, a snitchy kid giving a note your were passing to the teacher. 

I enjoy writing jokes on Twitter. I don’t do it to hurt anyone’s feelings. But when someone I have written about suddenly pops up in my replies column it stops me short. It’s quite easy to write about television and the people on it as if it is a magic box peopled by pixies that sits in the corner. When the box is off the pixies cease to exist and whatever you’ve said about them can’t hurt them, they’re off in pixie land. 

My latest experience with the mental dissonance of suddenly speaking to someone I’d tweeted happened today. Dawn Porter, the self-described “face of clean bum holes”, replied to this tweet: “Dawn Porter is in Dublin. I assume that means the Washlets Tardis is here too.” “Wanna have a coffee? I’ll bring you a free pack of Washlets x” she said and so began a back-and-forth in which I swiftly expressed contrition about my string of earlier tweets joking about the bum wipes ad campaign. 

Dawn has the right attitude to the whole Twitter jokes thing – in response to my apology: “Oh don’t be silly. I am the face of clean bum holes. It is to be expected x” – but it’s obvious that anyone who appears that frequently on TV and has 87,000+ followers must get their fair share of abuse. With my paltry 4000 odd, I get slagged off enough that my feelings get hurt every now and then.  

The risk of coming virtually face-to-face with someone I’ve made jokes about doesn’t mean I’m going to stop tweeting about celebrities. But it does make me think carefully about what I choose to say and why. Ego surfing is as irresistible for prominent people as it is for Joe Schmos like me. Why is it surprising that Victoria Derbyshire might scan Twitter for instances of her name and pop up to tell me my opinion on her show is wrong? Or that it’s possible for me to pitch my idea for an egg timer shaped like his head to Gregg Wallace? 

While there are plenty of prominent tweeters who act as if the service is an extension of a private member’s club where they need only converse with other celebs, there are plenty who listen to what the rest of us are saying. Sometimes they might not like what they hear. Other times, like me today chatting with Dawn Porter, we’ll realise our preconceptions might be a little skewed or as I said to my new celebrity friend (jokes!): opinions are like arseholes, they can easily be wiped away by a Washlet. 

[Picture via @littlejuande]

I started out as a finance journalist. I was 21 and fresh from university. Almost every day, I came into contact with bankers in their larval stage. No older than me, they had emerged from their chinos-and-rowing-stash cocoons into the uniform of braces and two colour shirts they’d copped from repeatedly watching Wall Street. If you think Gordon Gecko is odious, imagine him at 22, called Hugo, freshly graduated from Cambridge and braying about how much he “loves the banter”. 

I lived in a studio flat in Croydon. I worked in an ugly green building, editing articles about pensions and writing up interviews with identical looking men in identical grey suits. I spent my Friday nights dancing like a broken marionette to indie favourites at the Black Sheep bar. And I was happy. I had my best meals grazing on canapés at overly-ostentatious banking events. It takes no time at all to become a connoisseur of the mini-sausage with mash piped through it or teeny fish and chips housed in a miniature newspaper cone.

On at least two occasions at those champagne and tedious conversation jamborees, newly-hatched banker boys, who can’t have been more than 25, looked me up and down in my Burton suit and scuffed shoes and asked: “What’s it like being poor?” As full to bursting as their bank balances were, they suffered from a certain poverty of imagination. They’d strutted through the Milk Round and into the very banks that filled their debating society day dreams, the next stop was a lavish wedding and a wife waving Farrow & Ball paint samples. 

Express incredulity at the idea that anyone would feel sorry for Stephen Hester with his £1.2m basic salary and Swiss hideaway and some will come swinging back that “it’s just the way of the industry”. Some animals eat their young, it’s just the way nature is sometimes, it doesn’t mean that the idea shouldn’t make us feel a little queasy. Feeling sorry for Hester while seriously disabled people are worrying whether their benefits will continue suggests a startling lack of priorities.

As Ian Penman pointed out, the rich make news stories as singular entities (“Super-rich man might get share bonus”, “Famous man’s daughter is pregnant) while the poor are lumped together as a mass until they get arrested or killed. Competition in a market usually pulls down prices. It’s why journalists’ pay is so pitiful – there’s plenty of people willing to do the job for next to nothing. But that hasn’t happened with executive pay. It remains buoyant regardless of the general economic situation. They might have steered us into the iceberg but the boys on the bridge are still earning enough to keep them in gold braid and fancy hats. 

During the inevitable 5Live discussion on bonuses this morning, a banker’s wife gravely commented: “Sometimes they’ll have a bad year and not get a bonus at all!” I nearly broke down in tears at the sheer humanity of it. Just imagine the poor soul staring sadly at the array of luxury homes, speed boats and lovely watches in the FT’s How To Spend It magazine and realising that he has no “it” to spend. 

UK employees are taking home £60bn less in pay, in today’s prices, than they were 30 years ago, according to a new TUC report [PDF link]. The idea that a banker on £1.2m a year or a supermarket boss on three times that desperately needs to be incentivised more than a worker on the shop floor who barely makes a living wage is preposterous. But still, I weep for poor Stephen Hester who must be worried now that the other bigger banker boys will laugh at him for his pitiful bonus-free existence. 

If Mephistopheles turned up clutching a contract and wearing Paul Dacre’s face like a cheap halloween mask, would I kick him out as unceremoniously as the salesman selling brushes who snuck through the security gate last week? No, I probably wouldn’t. 

In my luxuriously salaried days (the dizzying heights of £28k a year), I would do my party piece rant about never writing for The Daily Mail at the drop of a canapé-sized sausage and mash. I’d be too ashamed to write for them, I said. It’s a hate sheet staffed by journalism’s crew of the damned. Home to the screaming skull of Melanie Philips and the unctuous babbling brook of bile that flows through Amanda Platell.

But then a few things changed. Through a series of Twitter-enhanced coincidences, I ended up becoming friends with Suzanne Moore, the excellently shod R.P. McMurphy of the Mail stable, the only half-sane one in the asylum. Why does she write there when the paper stands for almost everything she disagrees with? Because it is the biggest popular platform in Britain and she doesn’t just want to preach to the mostly converted in her Guardian column. Of all British commentators, she’s most shot by both sides. 

The other reason Suzanne writes for The Daily Mail is because it pays. Because she’s been making money writing for a living since before I was born. You can waste hours ruminating on what you want to write and where you’d most like to write it (believe me I do) but unless you’re actually getting paid for it, you’re as much a professional writer as the wistful lad in the coffee shop is Hamlet. For a good run of seven years, I got paid to write consistently. In the past year, that’s been a little trickier. 

I would pull my left arm off for a national newspaper column. I would dip my arm in gold paint and present it to Alan Rusbridger as an award for having the most wilfully dishevelled hair in British journalism. I would take my left arm and use it to prod some immigrants or point to a bizarre waste of public money by the BBC in their pursuit to destroy Christmas and replace it with Winterval. I would set alight to my arm like a fleshy fire lighter and use it to burn all my morals on a big bonfire.

Once my left arm was nought but ashes, I would stare up to the top of Mount Olympus where the national newspaper columnists gather on nights when Richard Bacon goofing about in the Groucho Club is just too much to bare. And my eyes would fall upon the king of the columnists, the one to whom even Richard Littlejohn, an adjutant of hell, must bow – Jeremy Clarkson. I would recall the words of Stewart Lee and recite them: “Behold, his outrageous politically incorrect opinions which he has for money.”

I would notice creatures swimming around below Clarkson in a kind of primordial ooze of bitterness and juicy innuendo about groups without the ability to deliver snide put downs on a weekly basis. Looking closely, I would realise that it was Rod Liddle and James Delingpole, swimming after each other, playfully nipping at each other’s tails, competing to see which of them could make the most objectionable statement.

But that day will never come. However eager I am to rip off my own arm in the pursuit of a column, I lack the killer instinct required, the switch in my mind which would allow me to generate artificial anger to froth up a stew of angry commenters. Yesterday on Twitter I watched as James Delingpole tweeted enviously about the storm that Rod Liddle created with his Sun column attacking the disabled:

“The self-pitying left-liberal wankocracy are going batshit crazy about Rod Little in the Sun on ‘fake disabled’. Keep it up, Rod!” 

From an opening salvo that read “My New Year’s Resolution for 2012 was to become disabled”, Liddle descended into a rant about the plague of fake disabled people costing good honest tax payers. That the only figure he quoted in his entire piece was an offhand reference to “latest figures” which “estimate that 80 per cent of people claiming sickness benefit are actually fit to work”, is not surprising. This was dog-whistle, will-this-do? keyboard bashing of the highest order.

Inevitably, Delingpole could not resist joining in and penned his own column defending Liddle. Also inevitably, it drew nearly 600 comments from the ravenous beasts in the Telegraph comment threads, a group so brutal that they would be thrown out of a horde of orcs for being just that little bit too unhinged. 

When I suggested that Delingpole’s tweet might be more than a little envious of all the fuss Liddle had stirred up, he replied immediately asking if I was a “self-indentiying left-liberal wankocrat”. He concluded that I’d be skint doing his job after I asked whether the role of wankocrat is better paid than his position as a controversy-baiting contrarian. 

As incredibly unpleasant as it is to say the phrase: James Delingpole is right. If I were a national newspaper commentator like him, I probably would be skint because the metric of success is controversy. The Daily Mail is the top online newspaper in the world according to at least one analytics company. It gets its clicks through gossip and outrage. Its columnists draw heat and every week they need to manufacture some more outrageous opinions for money. 

Over at The Guardian, alongside the usual suspects like Polly Toynbee, there’s celebrity recruits like Lauren Laverne and David Mitchell who treat having a column as if it’s a lovely accessory they found at the bottom of a gift bag. Mitchell just blithely picks up and puts down his Observer column when he has something better to do. It’s not a vital source of income for him obviously but rather a nice trapping that comes with being an actor and panel show main-stay. 

The biggest reason that I will never be a national newspaper columnist is highlighted every Thursday night when Question Time rolls around. Just watch Melanie Philips, a woman paid handsomely to pass down her judgements on society, talk solemnly about the value of hard work. Newspaper columnists are, by and large, finger pointers and not problem solvers. They are an overpaid Greek chorus, yah-booing from Islington townhouses, warmed against the woes of the world by their Agas. 

I would still rip off my left arm to get a national newspaper column. But would I want to lecture the poor on how to bring up their children or what it is to work hard? No. Never. Because, whatever dip my career might be in currently, I write words for a living and ultimately that’s a doddle. Columnists love to finish up with a bit of homespun wisdom so, as my dad always says: try going to war and then talk to me about stress. 

Chuck Klosterman has written a column about the album w ho k i l l by tUnE-yArDs being named record of the year by voters in the 2011 Pazz & Jop poll. 

I’m guessing this doesn’t mean much to more than (maybe) 10,000 people on the entire internet. In fact, if you effortlessly understood 100 percent of this article’s opening sentence, you probably tittered a little at that book Chuck wrote about heavy metal and can skip the rest of the piece. 

But there’s something about this situation I find pretty fascinating, even though it’s speculative and only partially related to Chuck’s career writing ponderous essays about minor aspects of pop culture. The man has spent so long taking a sideways look that he may, in fact, require wing mirrors. 

When (and if) you read Chuck Klosterman’s column about listening to w h o k i l l by tUnE-yArDs, you are reading two things: a passably written column and/or a pop culture critic that’s slow realisation he doesn’t quite get what those kids with funny haircuts are digging these days. Logic suggests the latter is more likely than the former because pop critics all go wayward eventually, veering into erratic orbits like malfunctioning Soviet satellites. Paul Morley had to be crashed into the Atlantic Ocean for the good of humanity. 

I’m not really in a position to argue for (or against) the inherit merits of Chuck Klosterman, simply because I haven’t read a damn thing he’s written since his essay about interviewing Britney Spears made me chuckle in the summer of 2008. I know some guys who think too much about the semiotics of the Brady Bunch and Garth Brooks’s ill-fated alter-ego Chris Gaines loved his book Eating the Dinosaur. I had no problem with it ideologically. I just never go round to reading it. 

Somehow, I hadn’t read a single thing Chuck Klosterman had written in the past three years before the internet vomited up a link to his piece about listening to tUnE-yArDs. I wasn’t even sure what class of writing it was supposed to exist in – it wasn’t a review, it wasn’t an essay, it was just some guy writing a series of confused sentences about an artist he hadn’t really listened to and didn’t understand anyway. 

The only thing I knew was that Chuck Klosterman has grown an ill-advised beard, which seems like reason enough to ignore him. But then his article was published on the internet, which made me think, I basically have nothing better to do, I should at least find out what he’s babbling on about. 

This being the Internet, you can read for yourself. But if you don’t feel like reading it, here’s enough information to pretend like you did. You know, for when people ask you: “What do you think of Chuck Klosterman, ace cultural critic and bold wearer of beards?”: 

1. Chuck Klosterman is one guy, a somewhat scruffy looking guy named Charles John Klosterman. This is approximately his four thousandth column. I get the sense that over-thinking things is part of his hipster-but-not-a-hipster aesthetic, because I just looked at the Chuck Klosterman Wikipedia page and noticed that the writer put a lot of effort into mentioning that he writes for The Believer.
2. Klosterman once renamed his Ford Taurus “the Tauntan” after the four nostrilled creature from The Empire Strikes Back, if that sort of thing matters to you.
3. The sentences in Klosterman’s article about listening to w h o k i l l alternate between those long, looping clause-filled runs that people who want to seem clever delight in and short stabs at being funny. You could quote them but I can’t imagine a social situation in which anyone actually would. It doesn’t read anything like Woody Allen but sounds like the kind of thing you’d write if you’re someone who wishes Woody Allen was still awesome and not just making creepy films starring women who could be his daughter.
4. I have no idea what the article is meant to be about. The premise is superficially indecipherable. There’s one part where Klosterman rabbits on about the use of pronouns in a Wikipedia entry. There’s another where he tells us about how much his wife likes the record. It may be the most grating point in any article published in 2012 but it’s early days. 

The takeaway from all this, I suppose, is that Chuck Klosterman is pretty good at picking at pop culture’s scabs. He had irrefutable talent but doesn’t think there’s really any point in properly listening to a record before penning a few thousand words about where it fits in the canon he’s been reordering in his brain since he was 15.

He could end up like Dave Eggers or David Foster Wallace or some other Dave that people like. But it’s just as possible – in fact, more possible – that this will not happen. Chuck will probably just write a bunch more essay collections of varying quality until the notion of saying vaguely pithy things about cancelled sitcoms and old metal records is unworkable. 

Then Klosterman will end up with this bizarre 50-year-old life, where his singular claim to fame is as that pop culture critic who wrote that thing once that some people tweeted about a bit. 

I am rooting for you, Chuck Klosterman, I liked that essay collection, and I hope you write many more. I want you to be a genius, and I have no reason to believe that won’t happen one day. But maybe actually listen to the records a few times first, because, well maybe, you won’t come off so poorly next time. 

My childhood visions of the future were elaborate and optimistic. The scenes were a cut and paste job of robots and megacities, space colonies and jet packs. I gobbled up comics, books and films to feed my future dreaming. Grown up (of sorts), the future feels as if it will be like today but worse somehow. 

In the Alka Seltzer fizz of the nineties, when the long hangover of nuclear confrontation seemed to be clearing, it was so much easier to dream of a shiny science fiction future. It was the big dumb future of the Lost In Space reboot – Daz white spacesuits, men with chiseled Joey Tribiani jaws and terrorists foolish enough to rely on Gary Oldman to get the job done. 

If you were lucky enough to live in a peaceful part of the placid west, the nineties were a kind of nothing decade. The ugly realities of the noughties future were squirming around just under the surface but they were easy to ignore, drunk on cheap credit and reheated pop culture pastiches. 

My nineties was a slow slide from toddler to bullied school boy to tolerated sixth former. At one point, choosing between Blur or Oasis seemed pivotal and whether or not your owned Kappa popper trousers was the difference between success and social Siberia. 

I was 17 when the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 took place. They were at once horrifying and distant. They were something that had happened on TV and virtually everything about them was filtered to me through a speaker, from the Today programme or the 10 O’Clock News. Norfolk was not abuzz with talk of terrorists. 

While the planes were striking the towers, I was in a history class on the causes of the First World War. I heard the news from a disinterested bus driver who muttered something about Bin Laden. The radio burbled away with theories and static but I didn’t see that footage, the dust and carnage, until my bike ride home from my grandparents. I stopped outside an electrical shop and stared at the bug eye of big screens in the window. 

It didn’t hit me then – my 17-year-old brain was stuffed with thoughts of girls who didn’t know my name and books I wanted to buy – but that atrocity exhibition in the Radio Rentals window demolished the beautiful future dream. The sense that the universe can vaporise you as quickly as a sadistic kid slaughtering ants with a kettle became very real. 

The new century began in September 2001. While the history books we’d been clutching in that class on the afternoon of 11 September made sure to draw lines between war and postwar, there hadn’t been a day in the 20th century when an armed conflict hadn’t been clattering on the periphery. 

The 21st century has just made taking sides and placing bets even tougher. The Soviet Union was the big bad end-of-level boss. In the new century, the enemies were nimbler and harder to catch. Osama Bin Laden was practically mythical by the time the Navy Seals gunned down the flesh and blood vessel in Abbotabad ten years later. 

As the chatter about Iran gets louder, I can hear Things Can Only Get Better being piped into my brain stem, the deja vu flooding my system. We really don’t want a war, say the ministers, while their back-benchers mutter and splutter about how it might just be goddamn unavoidable and how a good scrap is golden for the polls. At the same time we eye Argentina like Jack Palance staring down the goat herder in that Bill Hicks routine: “Pick up the gun…” 

The Arab Spring sprang to life in 2011 but, by the end of the year, while Ghadaffi was dead in Libya, the army was back lording it up in Egypt. Ask the Burmese how easy it is to shift military rulers who’ve spent decades drunk on the idea of power. Depose one man with too much gold braid and a penchant for summary executions and often as not another one just hops up into his place. Democracy should come with a gift receipt.

The future could be stem cell miracles and lab-grown future food for all but I fear it’ll be war for water, blood for oil and the poor pushed out of the cities. The coalition government in the UK is already aching to make the poor, the disabled and anyone else it deems as undesirable get out of London. China picked off the destitute from Beijing’s streets in time for its Olympics, Boris and Dave are just dreaming of the same. 

The hover boards won’t be here for 2015 and space travel is long going to be a jolly for the super-rich with bank accounts so full there’s nothing earthly to spend it on. In Britain, an ageing population and a dwindling birthrate means politics will be as stuffed with the old faces as rock’n’roll has been for decades.

If you think you’re bored with still seeing Mick Jagger creak across the stage, imagine countless years of George Osborne and Harriet Harman until their heads are presenting policy documents from pickling jars. 

The Italians talk about the “caste” that control everything. Everyone in power is old and the young can’t get their feet on the first rung of the ladder. That’s only going to get worse. The rich get richer, the poor get bitter. The riots last summer will start to look like hijinks as the real unrest gets started. 

To my generation, nurtured in the bosom of a boom, the future can seem incredibly bleak. Distracted by reality TV, Twitter and Facebook, you can ignore the hard parts for a while. Then thirty looms up ahead of you and forty is just over the crest of the hill. You don’t own a house. You don’t have a child. You’re nominally free but as trapped as anyone else. 

In Ireland, the Celtic tiger cubs are still clutching their parents credit cards and making an escape to Australia and New Zealand. They realise that the birthright they were promised – cheap property, easy credit and jobs there for the picking – has evaporated in the heavy fog of politicians’ promises. 

The science fiction future of my childhood dreaming is trapped in Star Trek box sets and the idle wittering of techno-utopians. The iPads will get thinner. The computers will get smaller and faster.

The big problems still stretch out ahead of us. Little wins are followed by huge stumbles. On our TV screens, in parliaments, in trading rooms and on the battlefields, it’s the eighties reoccurring. Fukuyama knows he was wrong. History didn’t end, it just looped around on itself and picked up cooler props. 

An afternoon in a sofa warehouse. There is a sale on. There is always a sale on. In the event of humanity’s destruction, a single sofa salesman would remain at his post here, hoping for civilisation’s return, desperate to shift that cream three-piece. I can purchase a leather sofa on interest free credit. An echo of a cow remade as a fetching banquette. 

A man with squeaky, rubber soled shoes shuffles over and asks if I need help. I do but I don’t believe his selection of lounge furniture can do the job. Ahead of me my girlfriend and her mother are trying out sofas. They comment on the squigy quality of cushions and the threat of cat scratches to sweaty brown leather. 

I turn round and see myself in a large round mirror: it’s Caspar The Confused Looking Ghost. I am so pale, I look like an unfinished portrait smeared out with charcoal and lard. Maybe a new sofa would solve everything. That salesman is good. 

Johann Hari and I haven’t always seen eye-to-eye, so I was surprised when he called and asked me to meet him at his bijou New York apartment. I was particularly surprised as he blocked me on Twitter and I live in Dublin which made the travel quite inconvenient. Eighteen hours later, I was in New York, clutching a bouquet of carnations and a small picture of Elton John as Johann had requested. 

As he opened the door, he looked just as I had expected: an extra from the unmade Molesworth feature film, the stunt double for Fortherington-Thomas, peering up at me with his big doe eyes. Those eyes were already welling up as he swung open the door. He started talking without any prompting. Luckily I had turned on my recorder in the hallway. 

“I’d like to thank the Independent for the privilege of working for them over the past nine years, and for offering my job back,” he said, staring at the floor with a studied look of contrition. “But after nearly six months living in New York City and plenty of time to reflect, I’ve decided to not take them up on their kind offer.” 

“But why…” I began to say. “There are two reasons!” he declaimed, jumping up from the sofa and walking to the window where he stared forlornly at the New York skyline. “I’m willing to take the flack for my errors myself; when you screw up, you should pay the price. But I’m not willing to see other people…” He caught himself. “To see other people, who played no part in those errors and are unimpeachably decent people, take the flack.” 

He stalked across to his small desk and waved a copy of the newspaper at me. The print was smudged from tears and the crossword was filled in with his own name over and over again. I noticed he had not even attempted the Sudoku. “The Independent has been great to me,” he said, “But the thing is Mic – and I wanted to say this to you personally – we need its principles in the public arena without distractions.” 

I was stunned by his honesty. “But what will you do next Johann? How will we cope without your excoriating honesty at the heart of the British commentariat?” He blushed. “I’ve started working on a book on a subject I believe is important and requires urgent action,” he said waving what looked like someone else’s book entirely. “Isn’t that by Noam Chomsky?”, I asked. 

He seemed to ignore me, caught up in his own thoughts. “To do this properly needs international travel and the kind of in depth focus that’s not possible when you’re writing a heavily researched column at the same time.” “Oh did you do those?” I asked politely. His look hardened but he ploughed on: “I’ll be writing occasional articles elsewhere but I’ll be mainly delving deeply into one subject for now.” What could it be I wondered? 

I tried to stop staring at a well-thumbed copy of the Beano that lay on his coffee table. “So what next, Johann?” I asked with the kindly voice of the good-hearted columnist and saviour of journalism that I am. “I’ll continue to be a loyal reader and supporter of the Independent,” he said softly, grabbing my hand to emphasise his point. “It is one of the world’s great newspapers. It is. It is. It is.” 

“I must be going now, Johann,” I said, removing my hand from his grip, suddenly remembering his harrowing tales of seducing Nazis. I feared the epaulettes on my coat may be too much for him. “I feel privileged to have been part of it all these years,” he said, a single tear trickling down his cheek. I backed slowly out of the door and went on my way, promising only to recount this true tale to my loyal readers. It’s what he would want.

“I’m stoned like a whore in a burka.” 

- SKINS, SERIES 6, EPISODE 1 

You can’t review a TV show on the strength of a single line can you? That would be dreadfully unreasonable. The game of stripping comments of their context to stoke outrage is pretty popular now. It’s the fuel for many a Facebook feud and Twitter spat. On any given day approximately 65% of Daily Mail editorial is predicated on a deliberate disdain for context. But there’s something about the line above that captures the studied shock that runs right through Skins as it toddles into its sixth series. 

The line is uttered by Ryder, a pretty rugby boy with a Piers Morgan ego chief among his unpleasant attributes. We’re not meant to like him so in that respect the line works. But there’s something about the sharp edge of that analogy that speaks to the generally unpleasant undertones that run through the most recent incarnation of Skins.

It has always been a world where drugs, drinking and dysfunction are the three Ds of teenage life rather than dullness, depression and daytime TV. Come Series 5, it resembled, more than ever, an animated version of elegantly wasted American Apparel ads. 

Episode one of Skins Series 6 isn’t on TV until January 27 but you can watch it online via 4OD now, in one of those forward thinking moves the kids love. If there’s one thing Skins knows about, it’s what the kids love, presuming the kids you’re talking about enjoy watching intoxicated drug sponges with a proclivity for stripping down to their underwear at the merest hint of excitement. Which of course of they do. Who doesn’t? 

I enjoyed Skins for the first two generations. Tony was the arrogant lad from school you always wished would get his comeuppance rather than a thriving as career as an actor/Abercrombie model/investment banker. And he did, punished with a fall from grace in Series 2. In Series 3 and 4, Cook was an enjoyable anti-hero turned actual hero, played with admirable swagger by Jack O’Connell. 

The relationships in those first four series were also enthralling. Sid and Cassie in the first iteration and Emily and Naomi in the second felt very real even if the plot lines that wrenched at their bonds weren’t. 

Series 5 left me cold. The turnover over of characters every two years has always been a clever touch with Skins but the new intake seemed to be shinier, skinnier versions of archetypes the series had played with before.

Skins is starting to feel like ever regenerating Puerto Rican boy band Menudo scouring the land to find a midget Ricky Martin or the Sugababes using skill cells stolen from Mutya Buena’s to create frighteningly scowl-faced clone. Though admittedly I would prefer to watch a TV show where either of those plans was the premise. 

The “stoned like a whore…” line bothers me not because I am gearing up for a descent into a Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells early middle age but because its part of a general feeling of unearned smartness to Skins scripts.

Watch the Series 6 opener and you’ll see the usual round of crowbarred in sex scenes and plot twists that turn so sharply you should probably have a neck brace on hand. Why does one Minnie suddenly jump one of the boys? Because…um…because…nope, I’ve no idea. 

It may just be that at 28, I’m too old to appreciate Skins anymore. That would be a shame. As Boyd Hilton wisely noted the other day, there’s no reason we should restrict our TV watching to shows that represent our own age group.

The trouble with the first episode of Skins Series 6 is that those characters feel utterly alien to the version of myself typing this and the teenager who lacked even a scintilla of the brash confidence and wild irresponsibility of the characters. Were any of the others shocked by Ryder’s whore in burkha banter? No. 

Recovered from a bin in Wapping, the original draft of Alex James’ fast food article…

GREGGS

Boss man Ken McMeikan has invited me to see Gregg’s brand new £16.4million super-bakery in Gosforth. Well, I say Ken, I mean the nice PR girl that The Sun emailed. She suggested it’d be a jolly jape for me to come and have a butchers (see, a pun!). She assured me that I’d definitely wouldn’t have to eat any of their sausage rolls. 

There are ten Greggs super bakeries around the UK pumping out grease like the hilarious fat guy in that video I did with my really successful band Fat Les. There’s only one Greggs sausage roll factory though and I got to visit it! I am so privileged. This is much better than being a pop star. I never got to stare at grease traps in the 90s. I was barely living. 

I liked Ken. He was paid to be nice to me and clearly loves his work. He was in the Royal Navy and says: “Being in the services really taught me some efficient ways of killing people but a well-targeted pasty shits on a Tomahawk missile.” 

This is much better than being a pop star. I never got to stare at grease traps in the 90s.

I’ve met Bono and stuff but that’s just really boring. At Greggs, they have the actual guy who invented the best-selling Jaffa Cake doughnut. He’s like a living god. I mean, I make cheese (I don’t like to mention it) but a Jaffa Cake doughnut? That’s next level. 

There’s a lot of love in the UK for Greggs, it says here. With 1,571 shops they have more branches than McDonald’s! Imagine that. They’re based in Newcastle so it’s all nice and safe and regional. Because Geordies are really cannie like. I’ve said that right haven’t I? [Subs to check]. 

Visiting Greggs got me thinking: in the age of the internet, hot food businesses are thriving, yeah? Because, you know, you can’t download a pasty! Or cheese. I tried that. It gets stuck in the printer. It’s a non-starter, the downloadable cheese market. 

Big business can be really bad and stuff. I’ve read No Logo. But they’re not all bad. Greggs are really nice. They gave me some delicious cakes. The little bakery in my local village sells stuff but it’s massively over-priced. And don’t start bleating on about that economies of scale stuff. 

Visiting the factory was Willy Wonka great – officially the best food factory I’ve ever been to and I once saw how they make Wotsits, so believe me I know my stuff. I’ve even been to a Gordon Ramsay restaurant and had a £50 tasting menu. Believe me readers, a spread of the finest Greggs bakes destroys that. Obliterates it. 

Be reassured in your belief that a good honest Greggs pasty is a fine lunch. I wish Greggs lived in my house and fed me via some kind of hatch and funnel system. 

MCDONALD’S

My day with McDonald’s was absolutely brilliant! I literally have never had so much fun. The Groucho is dead to me. From now on I want to hang out next to some deep fat fryers with a sullen teenager in a hairnet. 

I planned to look at the whole supply chain. Like when we showed that video on the Leisure tour with the cow being slaughtered and stuff. Only, you know, more upbeat because McDonald’s is brilliant. 

We went to Scunthorpe! Who knew that was a real place? And found this factory with loads of lorries sticking out of it. It’s the home of OSI Food Solutions. They make three million burgers a day for McDonald’s! Imagine. It’s like visiting the dream factory if your dreams involve cattle screaming. 

The overwhelming thing is the stench. But don’t think I’m using “stench” like you would to describe say the smell of Liam Gallagher’s parka hood. No! This is a really lovely stench. You know how the docks smell of fish? Well this is like a beefy dock. That is in no way a horrific euphemism. 

They machines slam together big rocks of fresh and frozen beef. It’s like magic! Poof! There’s a quarter pounder. Brilliant! Like how do they manage it? It’s just genius. The equipment is well good too. There’s a massive grill like a George Foreman for giants and they let me play with it! 

My wife is obsessed with facts and stuff. 

Next we went to a farm where there was a farmer and some cows and stuff. That wasn’t as interesting so we went to McDonald’s in Leicester’s Fosse Shopping Park. I got to go backstage! Imagine. I mean Glastonbury is good and all but this is McDonald’s we’re talking about. 

McDonald’s served 90million more people in 2011 than they did in 2010. I don’t think there’s anything sinister about that. I asked some guy at the British Nutrition Foundation what their beef (hahaha) with McDonald’s is and he said some stuff about it being unsatisfying and lacking in fibre and only being suitable to eat occasionally. They couldn’t tell me what “occasionally” meant and I’m not going to look it up. 

A day with McDonald’s didn’t put me off eating there at all. They definitely didn’t just show me what they wanted me to see. And I, as a hard-hitting, fact-finding cheese maker cannot be stopped in my pursuit of the truth. A McDonald’s cheeseburger costs 99p! 99p! You literally cannot argue with that and I’m not going to try. 

KFC 

I went backstage at KFC too! Please try not to be too jealous. My verdict? Better than the headlining the Reading Festival. My wife says the kids shouldn’t eat KFC because she thinks it’s unhealthy. She’s obsessed with facts and stuff. I’m going to make Kentucky Fried grouse at home this weekend. Ha! Imagine. Brilliant! 

Read the real finished article here. The writing above is a parody just in case you’re currently hitting the lawyer’s speed dial. 

The next time I see Jimmy Wales’s curious egg head staring down at me from a Wikipedia page, pleading me to donate to the cause with the doleful eyes of a basset hound eyeing a passing pork chop, I’ll think of the day he argued for the encyclopaedia to go dark. 

Wikipedia is a glorious and gloriously flawed global endeavour. The seed began with Wales and friends but it exists as it does now thanks to the funds and attention of a vast army of web users from around the world. It is not an American entity, it is a truly international resource but on Wednesday, it will go dark to protest SOPA. 

SOPA is a terrible idea. It’s bad for the whole online world as much as it would be detrimental to innovation and enterprise in America. That’s the nature of these things. The effects would reach us all wherever we lay our routers. But Wikipedia isn’t the place for this kind of political stunt. Going dark undermines a fundamental principle. 

If Wikipedia is used to make such a major political stand, it throws away any pretence of neutrality. Of course there are constant running battles between vested interests on the site and the ever present threat of PR people like the ever-reprehensible Bell Pottinger poking around but even a notional idea of independence is preserving. 

Wikipedia is not meant to be a fiefdom for Jimmy Wales which is why there was vote to determine whether the Wikipedia Blackout went ahead. But Wales was pointedly on the side of the switch off.

Wales might think it’s funny to make cracks about school kids needing to finish up their homework before the switch is flipped and the site disappears for a day, he’s really making a joke of the whole project. 

Twitter’s Dick Costello was right to dismiss calls for Twitter to follow suit, saying “closing a global business in reaction to a single issue of national politics is foolish.” 

So when you’re greeted by Jimmy Wales’s forehead looming down on you from the Banner Of Constant Pleading, hop over the pages on partisanship and shortsightedness as a reminder of the day when Wikipedia went away.

The Wikipedia Blackout will achieve nothing more than proving to naysayers that Wikipedia exists according to the whims of a select few. The principle of making the world’s information freely accessible should be Wikipedia’s goal above all others. 

Many commentators and observers agree with the line that SOPA fundamentally threatens Wikipedia’s existence but there are numerous other issues it could take a hardline on.

When will Wikipedia go dark for world peace? Or to protest against genocide or land mines or the threat of global warming?

Give up neutrality on one issue and you’re forfeiting it on others too. Wikipedia is about a multitude of voices and succumbing to a single issue damages that principle. 

If arguing with people on the internet was an Olympic sport, I might make the b-team of a regional side made of slightly aggrieved John Lewis customers complaining on Facebook and a man who once got upset about a misplaced apostrophe (long before the whole Waterstones/Waterstone’s thing made it fashionable). 

I’m pretty terrible at arguing with people on the internet because my feelings get hurt fast. It’s a throwback to school days where, for quite a number of years, bullies could turn me into a human sprinkler of tears and snot with a well-aimed barb about my mum/my haircut/my devotion to Judge Dredd and his no-nonsense approach to crime prevention. 

Over time I honed my ability to throw back a sarcastic comment or barbed insult but if face-to-face rows are sword fights, online spats are lobbing mortars across no-man’s land: there’s a good chance you’ll miss entirely but the direct hits do more damage. It’s also easier to find yourself facing an ‘enemy’ with far more resources at their disposal. There now follows a Twitter case study…

THE BATTLE OF FREETOWN 

This week, film-maker and screenwriting tutor Jon Spira responded to some tweets from actor and writer Emma Kennedy about whether young writers should ever work for anyone who does not pay. Little did he know that he was about to find himself facing accusations of harassment and be painted as a nasty, green-skinned troll man. You can read his take on what happened here and here. 

To be fair, Emma Kennedy says three of her tweets that preceded the conversation with Jon Spira were not included in his account. But what he did replicate was a screenshot of their entire back and forth. It quickly moves from a disagreement over when and if writing for free for organisations with a budget is ever reasonable into something bitter.

Neither party was entirely innocent but it certainly seems like Kennedy got aggressive first and was more ferocious throughout. So what? The content of the disagreement isn’t what I’m interested in. It’s what came next. 

THE BLOCK VOTE 

From the public tweets, it’s clear that Kennedy engaged in a running debate with Spira when she could have stopped at any point. In the end she blocked him, which she obviously has every right to do, and publicly accused him of harassing and tracking down her details when he sent an email to the address on her website.

She didn’t ignore the email but instead wrote a reply and engaged in another dialogue which concluded with a threat to report him to his employers for harassment. Others on Twitter claim this isn’t the first time she’s made that kind threat. 

Once Spira’s blog post began to be shared, it prompted more tweets from Kennedy continuing to paint him as a crazy harasser who had dug up her email address. She attacked him as a horrific troll and a “mentalist” who had bombarded her with endless tweets rather than someone who had a marginally different opinion to her on one topic. The emails he sent to her and published on his blog were, as described by her, “vile”. 

In one of her own emails to Spira, Kennedy refers to a chapter in Grace Dent’s book How To Leave Twitter called “The terrible unfollowed me email of doom” telling him: “There’s a whole section on people who send essay length emails to people who have blocked them. Go away. You are no better than a troll.” Spira’s initial email ran to nine short paragraphs and was clearly intended to clear up what had become a needlessly aggressive encounter. Ironically, Grace Dent no longer follows Emma Kennedy. 

IF YOU FOLLOW ME… 

It might seem faintly ridiculous that I am even taking the time to detail this minor skirmish in the endless Arguing With People On The Internet tournament. But there is something quite unsettling about witnessing prominent tweeters who seem to have gone light headed at the summit of their mountain of followers. 

Emma Kennedy’s online persona and the one that she presents in her Guardian travel columns and books is a kind of whimsical adult Enid Blyton adventurer act. She addresses Twitter as if it were a big gang bounding around an idealised boarding school where she moons over more popular girls (Caitlin Moran and Grace Dent) and larks about with other famous folk. Good on her if that’s what she enjoys. But based on quite a few anecdotes it seems she’s has a rep for lashing out when people don’t see things her way.

The lesson that Jon Spira learned was that it doesn’t do to disagree with Emma Kennedy. I am now summarily blocked, not for directly contradicting her words but for sharing Spira’s blog posts. Highlighting a rather pointed amendment someone had made to her Wikipedia page probably didn’t help either. 

I can understand how someone with tens of thousands of Twitter followers can end up feeling miserable and under attack when people descend to criticise them. While that’s what the block button is there for, Twitter can be like stumbling into a room full of people who want to kick you in the shins and spit on your best work as much as it can be an amazing party packed with brilliant people telling you astounding stories.

I have a fraction of the followers Emma Kennedy has and I’ve definitely received replies that have made me feel like I did back when I was picked on school boy. But sometimes people won’t agree with what you have to say and they’ll try to debate with you. That’s what happens if you share your thoughts and opinions in public. 

If there was a spotter’s guide to internet creatures, it would note that people who disagree are not necessarily trolls. They could just be people who think differently. Giana Trapani who has even more followers than Emma Kennedy, 200,000 in fact, posted a good piece on the challenges of dealing with a large following just today.

As a minor league Arguing With People On The Internet player, I prefer that non-contact version where you play the ball and not the man. I don’t always succeed. I’ve certainly been guilty of foul play in my time but when someone like Emma Kennedy who has an army of followers plays dirty against someone who has a far smaller platform to defend themselves, it’s an unedifying spectacle. She was arrogant and unpleasant. 

I’m sure if Emma Kennedy read this blog she’d conclude that I’m just another horrible troll man attacking her for no reason and failing to appreciate the subtle nuance of her finely-honed arguments. But I’m not. She’s just an example of the way things can go a little bit wrong on Twitter when big egos are further swelled by a big platform. 

There’s a class of prominent Twitterers in the UK who really do believe that they make the rules and that, by and large, the people that follow them are there to listen and pay homage to their charming banter with the important people (anyone who has a book/TV series/film to point to). Dare to disagree with them, even in friendly way, and you’re running the risk of being shoved under the bridge with the trolls. 

Emma Kennedy has now written about her view on Twitter spats on her blog and Jon Spira has responded noting that he didn’t know she’d blocked him when he emailed her. If you disagree with me, let’s have a game of Arguing With People On The Internet on Twitter.

My mum was 23 when I was born, 5 years younger than I am now. On January 28 1984, my dad was thousands of miles away on a second visit to the Falklands, thanks to some inconveniently inconsiderate Argentinians. The winter of 83/84 was, well, an actual proper winter and when my granddad came to collect my mum and gran from the Norfolk & Norwich Hospital they had to trudge through snow.  

I can’t imagine what it must be like to be alone with a newborn baby, your husband onboard a ship bobbing around a windswept clutch of rocks that has only just got done being a war zone. But, of course, my mum could handle it because she’s a fiendish combination of empathy, toughness and sparky intelligence. My dad didn’t see me until I was 3 months old and my mum maintains I gave him a dirty look when he did. 

I can think of at least one occasion when my dad has literally saved my life. Tottering about on common land, I didn’t see the carthorse come charging at me. The first I knew that anything untoward had happen was being picked up from the ground by dad who had leapt in front of the horse and thrown me out of the way. My dad is the kind of person you want around in a crisis. He cries at films but keeps the taps closed in real life. He’s a brilliant model of how a good man should be and I don’t think I’ll ever stop being proud of being Michael Wright the second. 

The stories that come to mind when I think about my mum aren’t as dramatic but their effect was to me. The first is about my second primary school which was ruled over by a tinpot tyrant of a headmaster who revelled in acts of collective humiliation. A stray gym plimsoll would lead to an all-school airing of grievances with everyone forced to file past him and present their pair of shoes. The owner of the errant footwear would be publicly chastised until there were tears.

The petty cruelty extended to games lessons where the classic “play in your pants and vest” rule remained active long after  its heyday at pathetic public schools of the 1950s. For some reason I ended up as a particular focus of the head’s ire and soon found myself being unfairly punished on an almost daily basis. It culminated in me spending an entire afternoon sat at the punishment post, an actual wooden beam in a drafty concrete hall, forbidden to move. 

I finally told my mum what had been going on and she immediately took action. She and my granddad, an ex-Metropolitan Police dog handler, went to the school and subjected the head to a very effective bad cop/absolutely-livid cop double act. Though my granddad is capable of delivering a cool-eyed interrogation that would leave Moriarty feeling a little unsettled, I have no doubt that my mum was the more frightening of the two. In our family, she is the undisputed boss. Soon I was at a new school where the teachers like me better even if most of the kids didn’t. 

The other tale that springs to mind is about a bowls club. While no major TV drama has yet been set at a bowls club, they are, in fact, hives of such geriatric Machiavellian manoeuvring to fill the scripts of a wrinkly West Wing. I came to be sat on the side of the indoor green at an unfamiliar club quietly reading my book and eating some crisps because my mum (a nifty bowls player having inherited the skill from my national champion grandmother) had been persuaded to play with my dad and grandparents. 

I was paying absolutely no attention to their match or any of the others taking place but a busybody had spotted me. He marched up to my mum and informed her in an imperious tone that I must be removed to the upstairs viewing area. It was as if I was a bag of soiled rags with a faced scrawled on it rather than a well behaved 8-year-old minding his own business. I glanced up from my book to see mum looking the man up and down. “If my son isn’t welcome, then we are leaving,” she said calmly, ignoring the protestations of the rest of the group. The game was left unfinished. 

Neither of those anecdotes seems like much but lots of bits of personal history seem insignificant when plucked out as individual threads. To me, they represent the toughness I admire in my mum, a quality she applies as much to her work life as she does to family. She is a leader in a business stuffed with PhDs and is just completing her first degree with the Open University. She carved out her career path with a certificate in Doing What’s Required and a diploma in Bullshit Detection. 

I didn’t have to be educated in feminism by activist types at university. Just as Radio 4 filled in the gaps in my education by a magical process of auditory osmosis, I knew how kick ass women can be because my mum has always shown me that example. My parents are a team. The person best suited to the task does it. That’s why my dad is the chef and my mum is master of the finances. 

Most people love their mums but as I’ve grown up (whatever that actually means), my connection with her has only got stronger and more interesting. She is as capable of being a wise friend as she is the voice of common sense and on the odd occasion it’s even been me offering her a different perspective on a problem. My dad rightly says you can’t choose your family but if I had the option, I’d definitely pick my mum all over again. And dad of course. You never know when a carthorse might be rampaging. 

JANUARY 2002

I had been driving for just over a month and the joy was palpable. I loved my little grey Peugeot 205 more than is strictly healthy. It was physical full stop to the period of my life that required me to spend hours in a cramped car with a chain smoking driving instructor who made me pull over to ogle passing girls and make pitstops at off-licences. 

On the day I passed my test, on the third try, I came home to discover the letter confirming I had a place at university. I would be the first person in my family to go besides a distant relation called Raymond who I don’t know and didn’t like the sound of. 

If someone had asked me then where I saw myself in 10 years, I would have said something vague about writing. I could see no further than seven months into the future when with the right grades I’d be at Cambridge for three years of pretending to be a grown up.

The imminent moment of reinvention was coming. The Mic Wright of high school could cease to exist. I didn’t need to think about who I’d be in 10 years because I was too busy forgetting who I’d been so far. 

JANUARY 2012

The new year is 12 days old and in 17 days I will be 28. That’s the basic kind of maths I can handle but the results are a little unsettling. I did what the 18-year-old me vaguely hinted at. I did go into writing things though I doubt he would have predicted a start in pensions before swerving into technology through music and into the uncertain apocalyptic wastelands of freelancing.

On Tuesday, I was asked: “Where do you see yourself in 10 years?” I don’t know. 

I had an answer. In interviews, you always have an answer. It’s not socially acceptable to just blink slowly like a pug staring up at the vast expanse of the butcher’s window.

My answer was a kind of Consequences construction about family and being the best at what you do and fulfilment. It was an inelegant fudge. What I would give for the confidence of a fortune teller truly convinced that they can gaze into the mists and make out what shape the future will take. 

Where do I see myself in 10 years? Often I don’t know where I see myself in 10 days or 10 minutes. It’s a question that implies you should have some Soviet-style plan, that your personal ambitions are just so much pig iron to be produced, shipped and shifted. Write a list. Make a plan. Then watch as live swerves round your roadblocks and goes careening in an entirely unexpected direction. 

In 10 years, I will be 38. That’s a presumptuous sentence. In 10 years, I could be dead. I’m hoping I won’t be but what with cancer and asteroids and the threat of a zombie menace, it’s unwise to assume. “Never assume, it makes an ass out of you and me.” That’s not an appealing situation outside of a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. 

When my dad was 28, I was already 2-years-old. By the time my mum was 28, I was 5. I can’t get around to putting up shelves and they at least come with rudimentary instructions. I suppose one blessing with children is that they come fully assembled.

On Facebook, pregnancies blossom across my newsfeed and pictures of weddings have replaced feckless flick books of drunken nights. My contribution to adulthood is a fully-fledged commitment to anxiety and some half-decent jokes on Twitter. 

As a kid, you just assume that at a certain point you’ll be an adult as if you climb into a cocoon on your 21st birthday and emerge the next day understanding mortgages, dinner parties and the right thing to say to wine waiters. Then, on some frightening occasion, you realise that the state of “being an adult” is just an impressively sustained bout of pretending. For the past few years, I’ve been a terrible actor. If there were a reeducation camp for lapsed adults, I would be shipped there. 

I hate being asked “where do you see yourself in 10 years?” because no answer can ever sound right. But perhaps it’s a question I should be asking myself. Do you know where you’ll be in 10 years? All I can hope is that you won’t be sat here, reading another post from me about where I think I might be in 10 years.