HUMBUG AND COFFEE

We live in funny times.

We like talking about our weaknesses. We call them guilty pleasures. The songs or albums lurking on our iPods or in our CD libraries, which we’d only let our closest friends see, lest anyone without sufficient mitigating evidence might judge us harshly. It might be the secret weakness we harbour for that good-looking doctor on ‘Holby City’. The liking for simple things in an age of sophistication: rice krispies, perhaps. Those secret things: our thumbprints of preference. And yet in these days of Twitter and Facebook and the rest, life starts sounding like a riddle. When is a secret not a secret? When you tweet about it. I mean, it used to be that finding out what someone had for breakfast – what time they went to bed – what they dreamed about – was a big deal. A sign of intimacy. Now, though, we tweet our every move, appending photos of our meals or our surroundings. We tweet from everywhere… from our beds, from the treadmill, in traffic jams. And we tweet about everything… how well we’ve slept or that we haven’t slept at all, our daydreams and our nightmares, or just how good that red wine looks in those new glasses we bought this afternoon in John Lewis.

We know each other so well. We know everything about everyone, and sometimes most of all about the people we haven’t met. Bizarrely, we often know everything except for the passport-style details of name, age and address: I know an awful lot more about some people whom I know only by a Twitter username than I know about some of my neighbours or work colleagues. Because the people I see most days aren’t tweeting about what they’re doing, or thinking, or eating, they almost become creatures of the surface; the people I know only by a Twitter username are the surfaceless depth of knowing everything about someone I probably wouldn’t recognise if I walked past them in the street. Another riddle. When is a stranger not a stranger?

Writing this blog is a funny experience too. A chance comment by an astute Twitter associate put it clearly for me this morning. It was a bank holiday today, so I went to the garden centre. I mean, it’s almost the law to do that, isn’t it – visit your local garden centre on a bank holiday Monday. Anyway, just as I arrived there I simply had to tweet about it. I blame the blackbirds in the trees surrounding the garden centre, who were busy tweeting away about whatever it is that birds actually do twitter on about. So I added my tweet to the general chorus. I tweeted that I was at the garden centre, and that being there was making me feel old. Because garden centres are known as the nurseries of the middle aged (and older) – a demographic I don’t feel remotely ready to join. I concluded my tweet: ‘Bah. Humbug. Coffee.’ – announcing, as is de rigeur on Twitter, my intention to enjoy a bank holiday Americano. My Twitter associate replied that Humbug and Coffee was an unusual combination, enquiring whether it was a local delicacy. Amusing, yes, and of course I felt quite compelled to reply with an oh-so-witty photo of a jar of traditional humbugs from the gift shop just outside the café, but the comment also crystallised something for me… that Twitter is to coffee as blogging is to humbug. As glib as an Eleven Plus equivalence scenario, I know, but nonetheless it sums something up for me. I tweet about trivialities – cups of coffee, rainclouds, attempted witty observations. I suppose it’s the twenty-first century version of Eliot’s J Alfred Prufrock, who ‘measured out [his] life in coffee spoons.’ But if I want to write something more significant, like a blog post or a genuinely felt piece, I need to be miserable. Full of self-doubt. If I’m feeling happy I won’t be able to write about it, because it’ll all, in a perverse kind of way, be too simple. ‘I’m happy. It’s great. Yippee.’ Post finished. But good old fashioned misery, or confusion, or the anguish of wondering what life’s really all about… what an endless source of inspiration that is, and how much there is to say about it. It’s endless.

I suppose everyone likes a good wallow – but it’s not as simple as that.

I suppose writing can be therapeutic – but it’s not as simple as that either.

I’m one of those people, you see. I’ve got much better at hiding it, as I’ve got older, but at school and university I was that person that, with my facial expression neglected and allowed to slip into standby mode, people were always stopping in the street. ‘Cheer up. You know, it might never happen.’ And I probably wasn’t worrying about anything – that’s the irony. I was probably just deep in thought… miles away. That kind of thing. Because when I really am upset about something I’ll do a better job of cover-up than Yves St Laurent’s Touche Eclat. When I’m in true despair, I’ll seem like the best, most entertaining company in the world… I’ll laugh, and mess around, and do everything in my power to make other people laugh to the extent of managing to disperse my own sadness. And Twitter is like that – it’s 140 characters of pure escapism, hiding behind a username and a postage-stamp-tiny photograph. It reminds me a bit of the old jingle for Cadbury’s Fudge, with an extra twist from psychoanalytical theory: ‘Just enough/to give your subconscious a treat.’ And yes, I was singing that little jingle in my head as I typed it, trying to make the syllables fit, and I bet you were too, because that’s what it’s like, tweeting and blogging. It’s contagiously about reader appeal… you’re constantly wondering who’ll be reading it or what they’ll think. No-one, and nothing, quite likely, but you do write with these unknown possible readers in mind, and that’s where the humbug comes in. Because humbug’s not just a stripy mint. It’s a whole persona of outraged anger: the misanthropy of Ebenezer Scrooge distilled into one word, spat out with a relish which makes the reader almost shiver with pleasure and recognition. If we just started to moan when we write, our readers would log off. When someone starts moaning at me in real life, I log off – even when a computer or a BlackBerry is nowhere to be seen.

What we write in blogs or memoirs is a stylised distillation of the emotions we want to express, or the everyday realities we want to explain. Just as Twitter posts are limited to 140 characters, challenging our skills of concise expression to control our thoughts into a short enough utterance – a skill most of us haven’t used since we tried to write haiku poems at school – longer pieces, like the blog piece you’re reading now, are every bit as stylised… thought through, not stream of consciousness; considered, not random. And when you start to write a blog post about writing blog posts, or to tweet about using Twitter, then you’re experiencing a sort of Russian doll syndrome, with your words and your emotions and your ideas about how one might reflect the other nesting inside one another in an ever-perpetuating sequence of thinking and keystrokes.

Is it metafiction? Only if art imitates life. Metacognition? If you think about it. Metaphor? Definitely. Because if I am what I write then what I write is who I am and that’s where metaphor moves from likeness to reality. And in times when we tweet our every triviality and blog our more defining moments, then maybe the words that emerge as we tap away at keyboards and keypads really do add up to some kind of definition of identity. The sweetness and the sharpness of the humbug slip into the darkness and the bitterness of the coffee as our moments of amusement layer themselves almost imperceptibly around the depths of our sadnesses, and a whorl of thinking as unique and complex as a seashell appears on our screens.

Or maybe I should keep it simple. Tweet about what I’m having for lunch, or what I’m watching on TV. Not think about it too much. Because maybe nobody ever reads a word of it, or gives it a second’s thought; maybe online contacts are just the grown-up version of imaginary friends.

Like I said. We live in funny times.