Poppycock

Yesterday, squashed between Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday, like a burp between dinner courses, was an international football match. This being a friendly game that no-one gave England much chance of winning, the news instead focused on whether Our Boys would be allowed to wear a poppy commemorating Our Men on their football shirts. "No" said FIFA, citing their law forbidding the wearing of political symbols by member countries' teams. Ever quick to spot a bandwagon, our Prime Minister thought it a worthwhile use of his time to plead for flexibility from FIFA. Eventually a compromise was reached that satisfied everyone's sense of self-importance: FIFA could save face, The FA got its chance to appear respectful, and the Daily Mail got three days of foreigner-baiting headlines.

Two things struck me about this wholly manufactured story. First, if I were the Royal British Legion, I'd be desperate not to talk about it - and the rather cool statements issued by the RBL rather back this up. If you think of the values of the poppy: honour, sacrifice, selflessness and duty, it would be hard to think of a less appropriate group of brand ambassadors than those over-indulged, feckless popinjays: English professional footballers. The sight of alleged racist, serial philanderer and user-of-disabled-parking-spaces John Terry braying at his mates on the bench with a poppy on his chest is a toxic brand association.

The second, more important point is the whole issue of the poppy as a political symbol. Of course it is, and why are so many people so horrified to admit it? For David Cameron to claim there is no political link between war and remembrance might be charmingly naive in someone more charming.

One simple proof of its potency as a political symbol among many I could cite is the furore caused in their native Ireland by talent-dodging pop stars Westlife, who were used to promote the poppy in 1999. Whether you agree with the interpretation is irrelevant; the interpretation, as with beauty and goal-line clearances, is in the eye of the beholder.

I believe it should be embraced as the ultimate political symbol, understood in the context of the noble exercise of politics, as opposed to the less noble politicians it is sometimes tainted with. Politics is the attempt to resolve conflict without resort to war. It's the evolutionary triumph of the human brain. War is when politics breaks down. In that sense war and politics are two sides of the same coin, inextricably linked - so to call the commemoration of the consequences of war apolitical is disingenuous.

The poppy is the symbol of politics gone wrong, and the impact that has on millions of people when elites too proud, mad or deluded consider risking the lives of each other's children is a price worth paying. Sometimes it is, mostly it is not. The poppy serves to remind us what happens when politicians of all colours on all sides fail to do their job. So when a politician tries to tell you remembrance is not political, he's trying to get off the hook.

Good offences make good neighbours.

Last Saturday I took part in the most exciting piece of participatory democracy in my area since the General Election: a public meeting hosted by a local councillor to decide on a local issue affecting my street. There was a sum of money to be spent on local improvements to an area of greenery, to make play provision for the neighbourhood’s children. Except the neighbourhood’s parents rather like the green area as it is, thank you very much, and feared the erection of gaudy swings would attract an Unwelcome Element into our midst, to sit, after dark, swigging cider, smoking fags and generally Being A Nuisance. Teenagers, in other words.

From the neutrality of living in a house not directly affected by such a prospect, it was vaguely amusing to see the mix of articulate NIMBYism and misdirected bluster as people who had lived comfortably side-by-side for nearly a decade were forced to get distinctly uncomfortable by expressing a public opinion in full view of their neighbours, the political equivalent of getting undressed with the curtains open in our sleepy, ordinary street. Having laid the issue of the swings to rest, the subject of the deeply unpopular New Bus Route suddenly resurfaced unexpectedly, like cider from a teenager’s gut, and just as unpleasant. It had been in the local paper that the council had changed its mind yet again and re-routed the bus through the same neighbourhood, but not after it had spent many thousands of pounds erecting bus stops on a different stretch of road. A separate meeting was needed for this fresh challenge, and so a date was timetabled, and everyone left with a renewed sense of vigour.

To the outsider this might all look like a terrific waste of money in times when that is the one thing no-one can afford: money earmarked for a park no-one wants, bus stops installed for a road with no buses, and a social club rented for an hour for the hoi polloi to collectively mutter to their elected busybody. And yet it may well be the best money spent in the area. In that hour I met more of my neighbours than I have ever done before and felt a real sense of common purpose. Ours is a typical modern British street, with houses built within walking distance of some amenities, but a drive away from others, a collection of castles for Englishmen to hide in. Though well connected and served by facilities, it is not built around anything – it has no heart in any sense of the word. And yet, by its fumbling incompetence, the local council had engendered a sense of purpose to the place for the first time in a decade.

In the same way people exhort the government to stimulate economic recovery through investment in public schemes, I’d suggest there is a social bonus to such spending that has mostly gone unnoticed. If a local authority wants to foster better community relations in tense times – and this summer’s scenes in London would suggest it might be worthwhile – there is a cheaper way of doing it than building another youth centre or commissioning trampoline classes for the under-privileged. Every council ward should announce the most outrageous planning scheme it can think of: nuclear power stations next to the school, digging up a football field to build young offenders’ institutes, a combined uranium mine and refugee crisis centre upstairs from ASDA. Before you could say Section 106 Agreement, you’d have neighbours chaining themselves together to block the street, organising cake bakes and raffles for lawyers’ fees, exchanging emails and maybe even smiles.

It's not you, twitter, it's me.

For a free service that opens up the world to people, twitter attracts an awful lot of moaning. Not the untutored Daily Mail whinge that puts all the ills of the modern world at the door of every new piece of technology, but huffy exasperation from sometime and longtime users, who want to flounce away. With that in mind I wanted to spend a little more than 140 characters explaining why I was leaving Twitter, so people wouldn't think I was a flouncer.

Twitter is not just a remarkable tool, it's an eco-system that routes information, news, gossip and terrible jokes with lightning efficiency across the globe. And for all its exasperations - and there are many - it remains truly a wonder of the digital age. Twitter has allowed me to share insights, information, joy and tears with a remarkable community of similar misanthropes. Truly lovely, creative, thoughtful and funny people, all looking for a niche, acceptance and entertainment. But lately I have realised this is a double-edged sword for people like me.

I have somehow collected over the last two years some 1,200 people who, while maybe not hanging on my every word, at least don't find me irritating enough to unfollow. I have done this through dedicated arsing about, glib remarks and the facetious reflex of looking for the joke in every situation. While this can stand you in good stead on something like Twitter, these same qualities can also hinder your success in the world outside twitter in which most of us must live and earn money. I have always taken a joy in the exchange and banter of twitter, and the giddy thrill when something you post is retweeted. I started on twitter after I had been made redundant, and took some comfort in the detached voices shouting in the void, and the validation a growing audience brings. It continues to provide that sense of self-worth, but can also mask those all-too-real deficiencies that I went on to twitter to avoid confronting.

I started to realise I was living a dual life: the surface reality I was skidding across and the underlying life of the imagination, where every event, confrontation, news story or advertising typo was a tweet waiting to be written. Those times when I wasn't tweeting, I was thinking of things I could tweet. The narcotic boost to one's self-confidence by a RT would make the hours daydreaming about the next nob gag worthwhile; I wasn't bunking off work to write tweets, but I also wasn't spending time working out why I needed that audience approval. I could have conversations about work, shopping, the kids and proposed changes to the LBW rule while running a simultaneous stream of thought about the next wry 140-character observation. I have recently realised I liked real life less and less, and was seeking refuge in twitter rather than companionship. Unfortunately real life has an annoying habit of being quite important.

In truth, I don't think I'm dealing with being 40 very well. I become exasperated at my own imbecilities, lack of focus or career drive. The necessity to live one's life day-to-day is an inescapable responsibility, according to Sartre. I might have known that if I hadn't been on twitter instead of reading. My responsibilities are things that can't be dodged or compensated by a neat gag about David Cameron being a cunt. Currently I have an opportunity to develop myself professionally, and I think I need to take it, rather than consign it to the Bin Of Missed Chances that is overflowing in my hinterland. It's not something I do joyfully, but then how much of real life is?

It's au revoir rather than goodbye; I'm not closing my twitter account, because I hope one day I might find space for it when I like myself again. I'm just covering things in dust-sheets. In fact, I continue to use it professionally on @MikeHoffman1. Don't bother looking - it's the most fucking boring twitter feed in Christendom. Well, except for @conservatives of course.

My so-called life

I indulged in a little vanity exercise earlier this evening, allowing the Sunday Times to award me a fatuous ranking in its list of Social Media importance. The fact I came anywhere near the top 2,000 in the UK is a mark of its worthlessness as any kind of barometer of influence, unless making silly jokes on Twitter is the sort of thing that turns heads these days. But it does show the difficulty in deciphering the meaning behind the multifarious ways we use online platforms.

Take Fousquare, for example, which this week passed the 10 million-user mark (story here). For those who don't know, FourSquare is a mobile phone application that lets users "check in" to various locations around the world - restaurants, offices, airports or even public conveniences. This in turn appears in the timelines of your friends' Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn applications, while you get awarded virtual "points", and a ranking for that location. To someone like me who grew up before the age of portable telephony, it seems odd that, having attained majority, the first thing you would do is tell everybody where you were and how late you were staying out, like saving 10p for the phone box to call a surrogate parent.

More sinister was the website that was created in response, called http://www.pleaserobme.com/ that nicely highlighted the flip-side of this apparently wanton declaration of openness: that telling people where you were also told them where you weren't, namely, at home. Although never really intended as a serious tool for burglars, its point was clear: how much information is it healthy to give away to any tom, dick or Bill Sykes who was online?

So I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see the next escalation in this Social Media arms race, via a story tweeted by my friend @PhilWoodford: Fake Facebook updates. Apparently there is a company offering to manage your Facebook updates while you are on holiday to give the impression you are still at home. According to its founder, Gary Jackson,

"Many people set their lights and radios and TVs on timers when they are away so why not extend this into the Internet as well and have a virtual presence on social media to make any would-be thief think twice?"

This sounds an interesting idea at first, certainly for the light user of social media. But for someone with a more profound addiction who, say, finishes 2,212th in the Sunday Times Social Media List, it's quite an undertaking. My surrogate would need to go to the office to "check in" everyday (can't have anyone usurping me from the 'Mayor of Clerkenwell' FourSquare status), trawl the web for stupid links to post to Facebook, not to mention dream up cretinous comments to apply to all my friends' postings. When that is done, there's the terrible puns and political ranting to be done on my non-professional Twitter account (+1,000 followers who demand their daily fix), not to mention my work-related Twitter stream, blog updates, and manage the LinkedIn requests, referrals and status updates. They'd also need a supply of pictures of my children painting/dancing/falling off trampolines to intersperse the links on Facebook. The list goes on...

When I sat down to work it out, I wondered how I managed to find the time to document all the things I claim to do to my friends and contacts online. Much easier to stay at home instead and create a virtual online holiday from the comfort of my living room. It's the perfect vacation that the recession can't spoil.

The Bride and Womb

Surely the dullest of all the dull prenuptial conversations conducted in the media this week has been the Royal Wedding attendees list. Would the Syrian ambassador's invitation be rescinded? How come the North Korean ambassador will get to pocket a couple of vol-au-vents but not Tony Blair? Would the King of Tonga get an invitation +8 for all his wives? When the real question for William and Kate should have been: "Who the blue blazes are any of these people and why are they coming to my wedding?"

I didn't watch any of the Royal Wedding today, but not because of any antipathy toward the British royal family. I am a republican but, as far as I am concerned, that was actually beside the point. I don't think any of the guests should have been there who weren't known to the couple, and they should have kept the cameras outside; not because I don't want to see it (I'm fairly adept at not watching TV), but because, frankly, it's none of my business. Or yours.

The decision to make the wedding of the second in line to the throne a state occasion is at once baffling and revealing. It's strange because Prince William getting married is no more a public occasion than his graduation, first communion or passing out from Sandhurst. By making it into a state occasion, where politics and diplomacy guide the invitations as surely as kinship, it reveals the event as, ultimately, a medieval throwback.

Once upon a time, the new Duke of Cambridge would have had little say in who he married, and would have been unlikely to have known his bride before the wedding ceremony. It wasn't a match made for love, but for political strategy - to forge alliances with other countries, to strengthen their mutual lines of succession. We can now take comfort in changed times, and even celebrate the fact that Prince William was probably the first royal heir in history to have enjoyed an uncoerced and leisurely courtship. But by putting the wedding on a footing with a coronation, we are tacitly acknowledging the base meaning behind the feathery hats and polished carriages: in a political system based upon genetics not public election, you've got to grow your own. And here's where it gets down to brass tacks; I'm surprised broadcasters didn't ask to carry on transmitting fly-on-the-wall style through the honeymoon. Or at least demand to see the bedsheets as proof.

Of course I can understand the public interest in the event. I'm not saying that it's wrong for people to have enjoyed today's ritualised squiring - it's natural, human curiosity, like rubbernecking a car crash. But, equally, if William and Kate had wanted to get hitched in a Las Vegas drive-thru in His 'n' Hers Elvis outfits and let the glossy mags treat for the rights to their pictures, that would have been fine with me. Even if I didn't get the day off work as a result.