Twitter, Happier, More Productive – The Week of Weird

Weird things have been happening recently.

The first and main weird thing is that The Internet has taken yet another step toward Skynet by replacing the law courts of the UK and putting instant justice in the hands of the pitchfork-waving masses, cheered on by national treasures via the medium of Twitter.

As it goes, said masses didn’t do a bad job at being outraged and succeeded firstly in overcoming a Super Injunction imposed by evil toxic waste dumpers Trafigura (I totally didn’t understand how this one worked, but I’m sure it was once the plot of an episode of Captain Planet) and then in proving that, despite the suggestion of her column’s byline, they most certainly weren’t thinking what Jan Moir was thinking.

It’s strange really, cause essentially what people are doing is talking about current affairs just as they always have, but a combination of the permanence and weight of ideas being written down and the speed at which global conversations gather pace seems to mean that if there isn’t some kind of consensus, news report and groveling apology within a few hours, then a story is moving very slowly and may just disappear altogether.

In any case, for better or worse, the whole business showed me that Twitter is slightly more than people writing ‘I’m watching TV LOL’ for their mates to read and, with the added incentive of a new iphone to play with, I signed up. So far, I haven’t learned much (except from Ben Goldacre who seems to be a kind of one man bullshit detecting agency) but it seems like fun and if you’d like to follow my tweets on a life of music and procrastination, click on THIS LINK and then the ‘Follow’ button at the top.

As if that wasn’t enough, an entirely more positive, less angry type of weirdness occurred this weekend; The JJ horns were playing with Man Like Me at Jamm in Brixton, so Tucker suggested he and I dine at his favourite local Turkish restaurant. Being the enthusiastic fan of good Turkish restaurants that I am, I eagerly agreed, chucked on a suit (not cause I’m especially smart, but because I couldn’t be arsed with lugging a suit bag to Brixton in the middle of the night along with a saxophone) and headed off to Camberwell.

We were greeted exceptionally warmly at the door and shown to our seats. Before I’d even sat down, I was complimented on the fact that was wearing a suit and that I was carrying a saxophone. We were soon joined by Tucker’s flatmates Tom and Hannah and made our order. The waiting staff were attentive. Like really attentive. We were provided with rounds of beautiful grilled bread on the house each time it ran out and, every time they left the table were told “Thankyou so much” by the waitresses. As if that weren’t enough, we were bought a bottle of wine (on the house) and a round of Turkish liqueurs (on the house!) and, when the bill arrived, it was embarrassingly small, and didn’t really seem to add up to the stuff that we ordered that wasn’t on the house. We were then handed a hand written card that said we could have another free bottle of wine the next time we came.

All this would only seem only marginally absurd if we weren’t the only people in the restaurant being treated with quite such wonderful friendliness. Let the record show that this isn’t, for the merest nano-second, a complaint of any kind, and I wish all restaurants felt so much like the home of a loved one,  but do you think they thought we were someone else?