I Joined The Mob

So it's finally happened. I have become one of "them". I swore I'd never get sucked into such a world of corruption and devastation and what is frankly unnecessary. But I just couldn't help myself. During the great UK riots of August 2011, I joined the mob. I became a Twitter user.

That's right. I actually "tweeted". And not the stupid pointless doesn't-make-any-sense-but-I'll-put-it-anyway-in-an-attempt-at-being-ironic tweets (for example: 'Made up a joke about batteries before, but have come to realise it doesn't work when typed, thus rendering this lot of words pointless.' and 'green lantern is green') that I told myself I'd only ever use it, sparingly, for. No. In the space of one night I practically doubled - and then some - my total amount of "tweets" with a bunch of shit regarding what was happening in correlation with current events. Some were vague attempts at humour ('did I just see someone whacking a sea bass against a the window of a Ladbrokes?'), others were vacant reactions to news developments ('Apparently Camden Market is now burning. This angers and infuriates me.'). Most, if not all, of them included #hashtags. Sometimes even ###multiplehashtags because the attention-seeking bastard monster inside of me wanted to be noticed. Sadly, no attention was given to any of my words and the monster has retreated back inside of me (for now) to have a little cry and remember a time when B*Witched were popular.

But on the subject of the UK riots, which, quite frankly, is a lie (and a lie that BBC News kept ramming through my telly-screen for a solid day until they realised that Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and the smattering of other islands what the Queen looks after didn't want to join in with all the madness and eventually had to resort to telling the truth since the only places that people felt the need to take stuff and burn places existed solely on English turf), I must say I found the whole thing oddly surreal. Watching parts of London burning was less like watching an episode of London's Burning and more like watching some apocalyptic disaster movie. Unlike an apocalyptic disaster movie, however, it seemed to go on longer than two hours and largely consisted of the same live shot with no fast-paced edits where we cut to different camera angles of the burning buildings, crowd reactions of people standing in the streets looking upwards with mouths open in unison and pointing, and one man in a skin-tight, pastel coloured uniform running through the streets at break-neck speed on his way to "save the day". Instead, it took a while for me to realise that this was "real" and the stuff on TV was "really happening". Later on, things started looking like some horror-movie with zombies, but not the slow zombies of the 80s, complete with incoherent moans and bits of limbs comically falling off and landing on the ground with a soft thump. No. This is the 21st century and the zombies are faster and cleverer and filled with a riotous energy, not stopping at anything until they get to feast on the living flesh they want. Except these zombies wanted not flesh, but electronic goods. The fact that the phenomenon spread across the country the way it did added to that sense of this whole thing being a movie-adaptation of "What if society went really bad?", but the more it went on, the more reality pounded the crap out of the movie-ness thoughts, leading us to try dealing with the fact that "Shit, guys! Society went really bad!"

Luckily for me, most of the absurdity happened on Monday night, which meant I could stay up and follow the events since I didn't have to work on Tuesday. Therefore I managed to remain in a state of awareness and constant consciousness until pretty much 6am, when the breakfast news people started and my brain stopped. But all through the early hours, my constant desire for news updates grew and grew as the news updates themselves started to dwindle. My one source of constant refreshing during this time, therefore, existed in the form of the one website I vowed to myself years ago not to become involved with. Now, as I type this, my current total of tweets sits at 54. FIFTY-FOUR! Christ, I've only had the thing one month, I should be somewhere around 2... 3 at the very most. I never expected to be up to 54 until I was approaching 82! Evidently, my embracing of Twitter appears to be just the next thing in a long line of fads I never really liked to begin with but apparently somewhere along the way have subconsciously decided "well, if you can't beat them, reluctantly begin to join them in a few years against your own will".

Don't be surprised if I end up taking to the streets in a black tracksuit with a hood over my head, scarf over my face, a lighter in one hand and basebat bat in the other because I want a new mobile phone sometime in 2016.