SPITE AND BILE

Recently a long-neglected friend of mine had a bit of a personal meltdown in his private life and, possibly because he suddenly had time on his hands, and perhaps because it was all happening a long, long way from home, he actually got in touch with me, finally replying to a message I had sent him nearly a year ago which was meant to be an attempt to apologise for the interval of nearly a decade in which I had allowed our friendship to drift pretty much onto the rocks.

When no reply had come to what I thought of as possibly the smallest of gestures, quite literally the very least I could do, at attempting to present this slightest of olive branches, I must have thought “fair enough” I suppose, and regretfully got on with my life, because when that reply did turn up, I had almost forgotten I had ever sent it, which meant that it was both a pleasant surprise and a timely reminder that it would appear (and this is a salutary message we should all try and remember) that, on the internet, nothing is ever truly lost.

All those little messages that you wish you’d never sent; All those drunken ravings after an angry night on the town; All those Tweets that you thought better of later; Any and all of your spite and bile added to a message board; All those photographs of you behaving inappropriately – you know the ones, the ones you hope your mother, your employer or (if appropriate) your pupils never get to see – after a night on the town… Well, it seems that they’re all still out there, somewhere…

Forever.

Waiting to find you out.

Even if you think that you’ve deleted them.

If we are ever to be judged by our thoughts alone, it’s always a worry that someone could produce documentary evidence at the enquiry into your life. If there is ever some sort of a footprint that each of us chooses to leave in the endless sands of eternity, the thing by which we will be remembered (if we are remembered at all), we had better hope that it’s something more than that ranty response we might have made to somebody else’s firmly held belief, or that unfortunate phrasing that the “predictive text” chose to interpret your thought as actually meaning which then refuses deletion no matter what you do.

Excuses, excuses, but it does happen.

Honest!

It is, after all, very easy for each of us to be dismissive of the things that others find fascinating. I myself have endured the rolling of various sets of eyes at the suggestion of listening to the cricket and wondered if those people might ever learn to at least tolerate something that fascinates me, only to myself later dismiss Formula One motor racing as merely being “dull blokes going around in circles”.

Some of the message boards that I occasionally browse through terrify me, frankly. Or, perhaps it is just the contributors. I’ve already mentioned in previous posts that famous comment by Charlie Brooker, although it bears repeating here: “If I could create a virus that'd make readers' monitors spit glass in their ungrateful eyes the moment they click 'post comment', I would.”

Often, I am amazed by the spite and bile that is poured out in these places, as if the anonymity somehow makes it absolutely fine to be as offensive as you like to someone you’ve never met. I often find myself cringing on the recipient’s behalf and wondering how they really feel about such abuse, and these places are supposed to be populated by the fans of the thing being discussed, those who have taken enough interest in the topic in hand to go and look up further information on it, people who are supposed  to be the most tolerant of whatever shortcomings the subject might have to the larger, less biased audience. If these are the people who actually like what’s being talked about, who knows what the more ambivalent folk might think.

I mean, I know that I’m not a footballing fan, but I’ve occasionally been drawn to the footballing message boards by an interesting looking headline, and it can seem an intolerant and horrible place, but maybe I’m just too sensitive about such things and this is just the type of human nature that is considered to be “normal” by most of the world, but which is precisely the kind of allegedly “matey banter” that led me towards crawling under my rock in the first place.

Perhaps this all goes in some small way towards justifying my decade spent incommunicado with so many of my old friends; It was all part of a bigger need in me to hide away from the general sense of nastiness I perceived as being part of the way the world worked. Not that this was one of those messages I regretted sending, of course, it was merely one I had forgotten all about and, hopefully, if a little tardily, it seems to have done its job and tentative (and possibly semi-regular) communications have been restored.

Strangely, the very same week, another friend also got in touch after quite some time to tell me that he too was having problems with his life, and I hope that my pathetic and no doubt ill-informed reply to those problems was at the very least a helpful distraction if neither use nor ornament as far as practical and helpful suggestions go.

When I put these two unrelated events together with another memory of being called up out of the blue by one long-neglected friend after a five-year interlude to be told another friend had died, I do start to wonder whether I’ve become the kind of person that people only feel they can reach out to when there’s something unpleasant going on in their lives. Perhaps I’m just not the person to go to when everything in the garden’s rosy and peachy or any of the other, more pleasing and decorative plantlife. Perhaps my Eeyore-like countenance and bitter turn of phrase will turn the best of days into something far more ordinary, and find the cloud contained within everybody’s silver linings.

But when you fall into the nettle patch of life, when you wallow in a bed of Deadly Nightshade, then I’m your guy. Perhaps, somehow, if you talk to me, the voice of doom, your own problems will not seem quite so bad and you will go away with a new perspective, although I doubt it. It’s probably more likely that misery likes company and it’s always nicer to know that there’s already somebody floundering in the tar-pit when you’re flung in there yourself.