On quitting Twitter to write my opinions in a weighty, leather tome.

A silly story, not a blog

There was once a time where opinions weren’t as big a part of our identities. Sure, you might notice the brand of tabloid that your workmate pulled out during lunch break and if you followed them to the pub in the evening you might catch an earful of their take on the state of the world. If anything, we had a word for someone who was always offering their unsolicited opinion — a bore. And if they were particularly outspoken or impassioned about their opinions we called them a bigot or a blowhard.

But that all changed with social media, especially the bird site. Now your opinion was essential in order to show what kind of person you were, a bit like how the way you dressed and acted as a Gen X teen was dictated by the kind of music that you listened to.

The weirdest thing about it was the tone that people used, a sort of assumption that their dictums carried weight and consequence. More Moses on Mount Sinai than Zarathustra in the town square. It’s always interesting to ask, “Who do they imagine they are talking to?” when reading an opinionated tweet. Most genuinely seem to think that they are addressing a crowd that have been camped outside their door for days.

And there I was, spouting my hot takes as much as the previous idiot. So, instead of quitting social media like a wise person would, I decided to buy a massive leather bound tome, with a large brass lock on the side, and write my opinions in that instead. If I found an opinion newly hatched inside my head, I’d unlock the tome, turn to the next empty page, dip my quill in ink and write,

“How do you make a middle class person think they‘re Malcolm X? Dress them in lycra.”

Then I’d gently blow onto the ink to let it dry, close and lock it up before going about my day. I have to admit that there was a lot about cyclists, but from the viewpoint of a pedestrian rather than a driver, so I was definitely punching upwards.

It worked too, I soon stopped going onto social media completely. I was hitting deadlines, feeling happier and spending more time outdoors. In turn, the trips to the leather tome became less frequent until it remained locked up in the loft for years.

I took up jogging too, until my joints started playing up. So I bought myself a brand new bike. At first I was fine going out in my everyday clothes, but it would get awkward and sweaty so I thought I might try on some lycra gear after all and it was surprisingly comfortable.

As the months went by, I met many other cycling enthusiasts and they told me that one of the best places to connect with other cyclists was on twitter. By then I’d forgotten my old password so I started a new account that was more in tune with my new interests. Wow, I didn’t realise how much clout I had. I was getting thousands of likes and hundreds of follows, especially whenever I tweeted about how annoying pedestrians were. A lot of those pedestrians were office worker types from middle class backgrounds, so I was definitely punching upwards.

My most popular tweet was, “How do you make a middle class commuter think they’re Malcom X? Let them step into a cycle lane while scrolling through their insta feed.”

The Mrs wasn’t happy with it though. I was spending more time on my bike than I was spending with her. Whenever she tried to talk to me about it I’d end up scrolling through my twitter mentions instead of properly listening to her. It might just be the case that I’d nodded obliviously through her threats and ultimatums.

One night, after I’d got in from a three hour bike ride, showered and doused in a deep, dreamless sleep, she used my finger to unlock my phone, crept up to the loft, and picked the lock of my tome of forgotten opinions. By morning she’d photographed every single cyclist cuss that I’d scrawled with my bespoke hate quill. She then posted every photo as a long thread on my new twitter account.

I was finished, online and offline. Divorce. My social influence depleted. I couldn’t even go cycling without bellows of, “Hypocrite!” and “Malcolm X!”issuing from car window and roadside alike.

If there was a plus side to all this, it was the death of the conviction that I was some kind of moral authority — that my opinions were nothing more than the windbag bleatings of an unremarkable bipedal omnivore. I finally accepted myself as just another flawed human.

A flawed, deluded human on an e-scooter.