S.O.S Syria: A Modest Proposal

Phase the First 

With the world’s attention rightly fixed on Syria-land (and UK left-wingers Charleston-ing in the thoroughfares to celebrate their small part in enshrining the entitlement of small Arab children to be mustard-gassed by their unelected leaders without the fear of British Imperialism), it remains clear that Something Must Be Done. 

It is clearly anathema to Right Thinking People Everywhere to dispatch the Cream of British Youth to the streets of Aleppo, especially when this Sceptered Isle is currently facing So Many Domestic Problems Of Its Own. Why, just 35 miles from fair Mancashire, lies the perturban sprawl that is Liverpool. Here the city is home to its third successive lost generation, a record only matched by a sink estate in Northernmost Mordorshire. 

With many ‘Pudlians largely impoverished, with few career prospects and desperate for an outlet for their aggressions and frustrations, it is clearly Time to Act. 

The solution (and I fear Regular Readers May Be Ahead of Me Here) is only too apparent. Let us tame two of the Great Social Ills of the 21st Century with one Bold Move. Philanthropy and concern for my fellow man leads me to posit one Noble and Worthy Suggestion – does it not behoove us to initiate, in short order, the compulsory voluntarisation of Merseyside Miscreants and their summary relocationment to Damascus and its troubled environs? 

Should you or any of your family (immediate or extended) dwell within the “L” postal-coded district, we at Syria S.O.S (Send Only Scousers) call upon you to do your patriotic duty and apply for your Syrian visa forthwithly. If such strictures do not apply to you personally, then you can still Do Your Bit. 

Simply mail or email anybody you know, have met or have vaguely heard of who lives within the DVZ (Designated Volunteer Zone) and encourage their participation. Vague anonymity, but an apparent knowledge of the recipient’s daily movements, may prove a boon to effectiveness here. In many ways, it would be a Great Kindness. 

While many UK squaddies would feel severely dislocated amid the looting, corruption, petty theftery, pungent odours and toxic surrounds of this divided Arab nation, for Scousers it would merely ward off any incipient homesickness. 

Phase the Second: Syria: S.A.S. 

Upon the completion of Phase I (and let’s not rush these things; after all, it took the population of Hull nearly six months before they started to think of the Helmand Province as ‘home’), then Phase II can begin in earnest.

It is, of course, abhorrent to see Families Divided by Great Geographical Spans, not knowing if their loved ones are safe in the ever more-dangerous environments in which they are obliged to live and serve. Naturally, then, it is Incumbent on us to Reunite them with All Speed. Therefore, I propose that all remaining Merseysiders are dispatched to the Eastern Ghouta district in time for Christmas. Surely no-one would want families to be apart over the festive season? 

With this facilitated migration complete, it only requires Nice People From Runcorn to move into the newly empty city and sustain its one clandestine and viable contribution to the UK economy – showing Chinese tourists the bungalow where John Lennon used to live and selling them counterfeit Cavern souvenirs. 

God bless us, each and every one, in this Great Endeavour. 

Next Week: Mars Exploration and the Meeting the Challenge of Pollockshields

The Gospel According to Me

Blimey, according to some sources, it’s 3,500 years (next Tuesday) since Moses descended Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. In truth, they haven’t aged all that well. Despite his innovative dual-tablet presentation of the All Time Top Ten Things It’s Really Best Not To Do, Moses’ prescriptive vision has fallen a little flat in the digital age.

Without the aid of real-time video and lacking any Google-friendly keywords (except, possibly, ‘adultery’ and ‘ass’), it’s frankly a miracle they went viral at all. In these enlightened times, it’s best to give them little heed (though don’t go coveting no oxes, just to be on the safe side) and instead adhere to My Eight Thoroughly Modern Commandamentoes. They’ll set you in far better stead than all that biblical guff and they use the word twat at least three times. Result.

 

  1) Everything You Have Ever Been Told 

Ever is Bollocks

There was a time, maybe a mythical one, when information was shared out of a desire to enlighten, to entertain or simply to nurture a little kinship. Those days are gone, as if they never were. Now nearly every communication is laden down with pecuniary advantage. You just have to know where to look.

Whether it’s self-serving office badinage, masquerading as advice or detached consultation, or media messages writ large with regard to your health or planet-wide sustainability they are all more suspect than the serial puppy licences of a 70’s celeb.

If you want to lose weight, eat less – don’t buy the latest diet book, only eat carbs every other Ash Wednesday or pay for the limited joy of being the third fattest at the weekly weigh-in. If you want to know how serious this weeks’ global threat is - follow the money trail. Who’s making money by resetting your Millennium clock or matchmaking your carbon trading?

   2) The Only Politicians with Convictions 

are Now on the Right

Political convictions on the left died and were buried along with Michael Foot and his donkey jacket. While Foot wasn’t actually interred until 2010, the idea of any left-leaning politician being capable of winning high office pre-deceased him by at least 20 years.

Nowadays, driven by Daily Mail dogma and an underlying disregard for any degree of nobility or selflessness among the electorate, Labour politicians take a view on immigration, social security and the finance sector that is more in keeping with  keeping their electoral hopes alive than keeping their consciences clear. It is their obvious lack of faith in the wider populace that is the surest sign of their perdition.

Politicians on the right, of course, have no such scruples and no need to pay lip service to any outdated concept of community or concern. The politics of the right have always been about duplicity, shamelessly persuading the lower orders that voting them in is ultimately in their best interest, when, of course, it never is.

With self-interest and social irresponsibility now, again, the political norm, right-wing politicians can once again wear their convictions on their shirt-sleeves, as they, ironically, get blacker by the day.

3) No-one is Interested in
 Anything You Say Ever

For most people, the death of their best friend’s mother means less than the loss of a hard-to-replace button on their second favourite shirt. Whether it’s due to the end of the extended family, the erosion of traditional communities or World of Warcraft being re-released with a slightly shinier cover, our ability to share sorrow has never been lower. 

Ironically, our penchant for self-congratulatory demonstrations of concern has never been greater. With a greeting card (or some apposite online doggerel) for every misfortune, we are more than equipped to ostensibly mark our fellow-feeling in an unmissable fashion while scoping Amazon box-sets.

In truth, extremity but highlights our casual indifference to one another, with most conversations merely tokenistic exchanges of tedious trivia, meriting less acknowledgment than a fat girl’s hat.

4) The Work Cycle Defines Everyone 

With communism now globally out of fashion*, save in hawking distance of Fidel Castro’s ear trumpet, it may seem odd that one of its tenets is now Truer Than Ever. Never has the inclusion of anything non-vocational on the school syllabus been more stridently decried, nor has the selfishness of those souls thoughtless enough to live more than 3.8 years after the statutory retirement age ever been more forcefully denounced. 

Blimey these old folk, with their worn-out limbs and saggy organs, are a bigger blight on the NHS than even the Tribble-like reproductive cycle of the Poles. Make coffin-dodging a capital crime (or at least a crime against capital) and get hair-dressing, plumbing and call centre etiquette on the pre-school national curriculum now, me hearties.

*I don’t know what precepts they run the PRC by these days, but it ain’t anything Uncle Karl would t-shirt.

5) Honesty is Truly an Affectation

Dishonesty, embellishment, evasion, misrepresentation, duplicity, cant, equivocation and bearing false witness – just as the Inuits have more than one thousand words for snow, we have, at the last count, 463 words for fibbing – though I may be lying.

With the pronouncements of public figures of every hue and varying stature inevitably self-serving, deceptive and steeped in mendacity, it’s small wonder they are inevitably post-scripted with an “and I really mean that”, an “and I’m not just saying that” or even an “and you can quote me on that.” 

With our default setting now being to assume that every public utterance is bollocks, such additional citations of honesty are pretty much tantamount to: “Now, I know I habitually mislead you and you should usually take my recommendations less seriously than you would a blind man’s cravat collection, but this time I’m porkie-free. Honest.”

 If you can fake faking sincerity, you can fake anything (except probably seeing I Love My Country as a fine career move by Frank Skinner).

6) Britain is Not Coming Out of Recession; 

It’s Getting Nearer to an Election

Recession is a tricky thing for the Tory-dominated coalition. On one hand, you have to demonstrate a little economic progress. You can’t forever demand apologies from a Milliband for The Mess You Lot Left Us In (regardless of the tangled roots of the financial crises and their forgotten enmeshment with US sub-prime mortgages and the fact that Mrs Thatch, God rest her, sold British industry for some magic beans and hat that looked the Queen’s). 

Obligingly, as the presumably goldfish-like memory of the electorate has to be primed with Good Things This Administration Has Done, as 2015 hoves into view, so various bodies, enlightened with grievous self-interest, do the business. Things have never been so good – and you can quote us on that, say the Association of Small Businesses. “We think a corner has definitely been turned and we’re not just saying that,” promises the CBI.

With the figures bandied enthusiastically by Sky News at every conceivable instance (“With the economy definitely improving, let’s see if the weather is too…”), the right-of-centre tabs and every self-interested pundit on a nice little lobbying refresher, such nonsense soon becomes front-of-house orthodoxy, with the Labour front bench too timid or too busy tanning to take issue.

Fear not, such economic bonhomie will be decidedly short-lived. Come the flip side of Cameron II: The Sole Poll Redemption and frugality will be back on the agenda. The Global Economic Downturn is, after all, 9/11 for the Right and they won’t give it up lightly. After all it’s not ideology or dogma that has closed a kindergarten near you; it’s The Mess You Lot Left Us In and I Mean That Most Sincerely. 

7) Apologies are a Licence to be Lambasted 

(Unless You’re Famous)

We forgive the famous pretty much everything, save masked YouTube rapping at contract renewal time and, of course, kiddy-fiddling. Somewhere, like the Dark Net (where paedo-porn abounds and a heroin hit is just a mouse click away), there is Dark Dave. 

Dark Dave, flagship of the under-cable, features back-to-back Top of The Poppery, perennially hosted by Jimmy Savile and the Hairy Pornflake, where Jonathan King and Gary Glitter’s cover of Save All Your Kisses For Me is always number one, and, with a knowing leer and a front row wink, Stuart Hall plays backing maracas forever.

While the denizens of Dark Dave have all the redemption potential of a soiled Green Shield, other celebrities spring from infamy with Get Out of Jail Free alacrity following a public apology, no matter how stilted or staged. For a masterclass in insincerity take Tiger Wood’s public apology to his Mrs and his legion of badly-jumpered fans. For an A-class celeb caught hiding the sausage, don’t cite opportunity or random randiness, take the sex addict defence and spend three weeks rehabilitating with Michael Douglas and Kanye west for company.

The Priory has become the naughty step of notoriety, a place from which celebs return forgiven and, maybe, just that little bit more box office bankable. Had Hitler blamed World War II on a bad childhood experience and a paint allergy, he would have had his own game show by 1951, after sad faces all round at Nuremberg and an obligatory three weeks in the Berlin Priory with Lindsay Lohan and a Beegee. 

For mere mortal though, apologies are a far sorrier story. In real life, only decent folk apologise. Such acts of expiation then give a mandate for the wider world of shameless twattery to see any acceptance of past culpability as an instant passport to accepting all future guilt – “Are you sure you didn’t start the Balkan conflict, after all you did lose that stapler in 1972?”

The mantra you learnt after your first post-adolescent fumblings with alcohol and subsequent carpet damage to house party hosters still holds true – never apologise; never explain. Not everything you were told as a teenager was untrue, just all that stuff about Jesus and fulfilling your potential.

8) Empathy could yet save the world

Despite all this downbeatery and eminently useful neo-realisms, I do see a twinkle of hope for the world. While I may yet sue the estates of sundry dead Beatles for misleading me into youthfully believing All You Need is Love, subpoena Jennifer Rush when it comes to gross misrepresentation of the Power of Love or indeed indict Wet Wet Wet (just for being Scottish and twats), I do believe other emotional resonances may yet save the world, if only from itself.

Empathy is a much over looked emotion. While there have been 82 UK number one hits with the word “love” in the song title (115 in the US – the soppy gets), there has yet to be a poptastic chart-topper highlighting the E word. Even in brackets.

Where love falls down in the redemptive stakes is its requirement for abject selflessness on the part of its proponents. It requires a generosity of spirit that was long ago deemed Not Wanted On Voyage by the knocks and blows that hew out the contemporary human. 

Empathy, on the other hand, is all about self-interest. Who among us could DarkYouTube a Mexican drug mule being beheaded by a rival cartel and not have a wince of I’m Glad That’s Not Me? There’s a wisp of Don’t Do Unto Others What Their Surviving Dependants Might Get a Chance To Do To You With a Pointier Stick and Some Suitably Sharpened Callipers about it after all.

Imagination is the knowing consort of empathy and without the apt application of its good services this enlightened self-interest will not fall on fertile ground. Take those groups whose lack of empathy is the stuff of legend – the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, the Taliban and, of course, the Germans of today. Had they but applied their imagination to “taking the role of the other” rather than taking over Europe or taking an IED up their jacksies then then the world might now be a far more pastel place.

Other Commandments, Many of Them Less Sweary,  Are Also Available

Clive Harris: Gunged but not forgotten

Very sad news today that my old friend Clive Harris has died. Known to the world as “Bill Shipton” – a nom de plume (or nob de plume as Clive would almost inevitably have termed it) he adopted partly to spare his parents’ blushes and partly just because he enjoyed assuming other identities. He was “De Forest Hill” for a number of his contributions to Mayfair, the soft-core girly mag we both worked for at the end of the 1980s. All of his aliases used elements of places he had had lived, though I am not entirely sure when he lived in Shipton. Forest Hill, though, was his home throughout the 80s and until he moved to St Leonard’s. 

It was at Mayfair that he first hit on the idea of launching Splosh! (variously Splush and Splash before he settled on the final title). It was this magazine and its various video/event/photoset spin-offs that dominated the last quarter century of his life. Although he claimed never to be an enthusiast for all things messy in the way that his many readers were, most of us had our doubts, but never pushed him too far on the subject. Despite his very public showman persona, he could be quite a private man. 

Splosh was to prove a real adventure for him and he recounted many of the more outlandish episodes with typical aplomb. There was the German photographer who visited him as part of a pilgrimage to the home of Messy Fun and, as a parting shot, pointed to the rear of his car and offered: “And if you are interested, Mr Shipton, my boot is full of pissing videos”. Surely a sentence not found in many phrase books. 

Then there was his injunction from a well-known high-street chain when his spin-off foot fetish line, Toes R Us, reached the attention of the nationals. He made the nationals again when he, a film crew, a bunch of scantily-clad young ladies and several gallons of custard were forcibly evicted from a Manchester hotel one evening. Knowing the hotel in question, it was probably one of the more innocent pursuits going on there that night. 

Despite his long association with Splosh, it was comedy writing that was Clive’s true love. I suspect that it was this element of sploshing – surely the most comedic of fetishes – that actually appealed to him. He was extremely proud of the sketches sold to the Two Ronnies and the two (I think) humour books he had published in the 80s. I suspect, he would have loved to have done more of that. 

His bawdy, carousing image was partly one of his other characters, but it was one he had played so long and so well that it was sometimes hard to tell where Bill Shipton stopped and Clive Harris started. The real Clive was a diligent son, resigned to spending Christmas and birthdays with his aging parents and never missing out on his filial obligations – though subsequently recounting these inevitably teetotal occasions with more than a touch of the Alan Bennetts. 

His sense of obligation and his obvious genuine affection for his parents was heightened by the early death of his brother. This was a person that remained clearly hugely important to Clive throughout his life and who he would sometimes namecheck with a sense almost of guilt that it was he that had reached adulthood and not his sibling. Typically, it was a birthday visit to his parents that stopped him attending a reunion of the last generation of Mayfair boys in April 2012. Had I known it would have been a final chance to catch up with him, the date would definitely have been changed. The fact it wasn’t is was something I will long regret. 

Although we failed to meet on that occasion – and it must be 17 or 18 years since I last sat down for a pint with him – we talked more in the last 12 months than we had since he last put together early issues of Splosh in my then house in Kidderminster (92-95). Always via Facebook, we caught up a lot on some of the intervening years. He seemed happy with life in St Leonard’s, though I sensed he sometimes missed the wider landscape of his London days.

Health – his own and his parents – was a forcible preoccupation over the last year or so but – in his own case at least – it seemed that he’d come through the worst. Obviously, that was not the case. Clive made an impression on everyone who knew him. His unconventional looks, on/off showman personality and his genuine wit and humour made him impossible to ignore. This was a man who was never going to be in the background (except in Viz where he has appeared in its comic strips as the token pervert/porn vendor since 1989 when he first interviewed its creators). He had a very competitive wit, hating to be out-ad-libbed by anyone and, in truth, he seldom was. 

As we talked of his health scares on line of late, we even – little knowing its imminence – joked about his epitaph and immediately agreed on one. It’s cheeky, a bit corny, but memorable never the less – the perfect farewell for Mr Harris/Shipton. 

“Clive Harris 

1957-2013 
Messed in Peace"
 

Downes and Out

Cheekily namechecking me on Facebook as some sort of print recidivist, Steve Downes (latterly of Juice Digital, but more famously co-progenitor of Paver Downes) asserted in his blog that recent events in Egypt have proved that conventional newspapers are finished, with citizen journalists now ultimately setting the news agenda via Twitter. Typically, I demur. Ish.

Downes: A friend of Mr Cairo?

Newspapers, like a kind of wood-pulp Michael Myers, have frequently been assumed to be dead, only to rise and continue stalking their prey, oft stronger than before. Telephony, radio and TV have all taken a turn as nemeses. Telephony, of course, became a sometime abused tool of the trade and radio, I suggest, has not proved the greatest medium for extended analysis.

Of course, until recently, radio was also rather hamstrung as a medium by listening opportunities – while great for car owners, its utility on the tube remains somewhat limited. Technology, of course, could change that, though probably more to the benefit of Nick Grimshaw than James Naughtie.

Myers: Non-wood-pulp version

Up until the digital dawn, TV was undoubtedly seen as the great newspaper slayer. As with radio, it wasn’t really suitable for in-public consumption – though the combination of smartphones and free Wi-Fi on the Hong Kong underground seem to be boosting someone’s viewing figures – but it was (and is) great at delivering complex information in a memorable, comprehensible and, often, affecting manner. It didn’t destroy newspapers though.

Instead, as has been widely documented, an unexpected symbiosis between telly and the press sprang up, with TV life bursting out of the listings section and cross-migrating to the news, fashion, comment, gossip and feature sections of virtually every UK newspaper. While The Star may front-page Big Brother lesbian fisherwomen on a self-serving daily basis, The Guardian et al still have their higher-browed weekly analyses of significant motifs in Les Revenants. TV, for its part, repays the debt with its daily review of What’s In The Papers.

Cross-media ownership – Channel 5/The Express, News International/Sky etc – only fuels the beast, driven by cross-promotion, faux exclusives and the desire to push a multi-platform world view. While it’s true in the UK that TV channels are restricted in terms of the political bias they can manifest, anyone who saw Sky News’ coverage of the 2010 election will remember the Fox-lite chicanery the channel adopted, much of which saw the channel get its knuckles rapped, somewhat lightly, long after the ballots were well and truly closed.

In light of this, you could argue that the internet (or one of its many manifestations) was just one more minor obstacle to overcome in the 400 year-plus history of printed news. I wouldn’t argue that though. The combined effect of twitter, Facebook and other websites is, of course, hugely transformational. There is barely a conventional news operation in the world that doesn’t now have its own online presence.

In fact, I suspect only three factors keep the presses rolling – the lingering preference of an older generation of (cash-rich) readers, the difficulty of monetising on-line news sites and the institutional habits of press organisations, some of which, like The Observer, have been killing trees on a weekly basis for 350 years or more. Unravelling such an organisation – printers, distributors, paper suppliers etc – is a massive operation, dwarfing even the 1987 revolution that sent typesetters into premature (but much-deserved) retirement. Of these three factors, the second is by far the most important, with the other two merely being transitory diversions.

As with the 1987 Wapping-led transformation of the newspaper industry, there is a huge pecuniary incentive for proprietors to embrace the on-line world. If advertising rates could be maintained, then the industry would flourish, suddenly free of virtually all distribution and production costs. Sadly, advertisers are not playing ball, with on-line rates still a fraction of the real world equivalent. Proprietors are thus obliged to maintain their print editions, both to retain their ad revenue and as a form of brand protectionism. Launching a printed newspaper is expensive, while online entry is comparatively cheap. At present, it is the off-line entity that both legitimises and funds its online equivalent (with one or two notable exceptions – the Huffington Post springs to mind).

All of which lengthy (but necessary) preamble, leads us belatedly to the main assertion – newspapers have lost their political sway in the face of the first hand, non-journalistic clout of Twitter and, to a considerably lesser extent, Facebook.

Not everyone in Trahir Square quite got the hang of social media

First of all, Egypt is a poor example. Although its press (and internet) is relatively free by Middle-Eastern standards, it is way behind the UK (for instance) in terms of absolute freedom. The majority of its newspapers, television channels and radio stations (though admittedly not all) are government owned. Even the so-called independents have suffered from heavy-handed treatment when they refuse to toe the (increasingly confusing) party line. In this environment, Twitter (et al) is not necessarily the medium of choice, but rather the only means open – especially if you want to play to the international gallery.

It says: "I've just un-friended Morsi"

While the world may have been kept informed of events in Tahrir Square via Twitter, I suspect the majority of us read about said tweets in the press (print or digital) or heard them read out on the tellybox. Most of us wouldn’t have been following tahrirbrickchucker37 personally and nor would we have understood his 140 Egyptian characters or less. True, we could have been alerted to events by re-tweets or even followed a trending topic. In the latter case, though, this was probably after we first became alerted to the events taking place.

While those with a particular interest in Egyptian politics may have set up a search column or followed a certain hashtag relating to the events, most of us would only have learnt of them on an incidental basis. With a general awareness of the situation, though, it would not be beyond most of us to focus our Twitter radar in that direction in order to keep abreast of developments.

What of genuine breaking news though? The kind that comes completely out of the leftfield? One of the few items of news I learnt of first on Twitter was the death of Michael Jackson. My reaction – probably exactly the same as everyone else’s – was to check if it was true via conventional media brands. That, in essence, is one of the key problems with relying on Twitter for your world view – verification.

Goldblum: Not dead, just irritating

It’s open access and the difficulty of authentication has led to a number of fraudulent reports of deaths – Jeff Goldblum for instance. In most cases, unless you actually know the tweetee in question, any Twitter report is essentially unsafe until it has been confirmed by ‘proper media’. Even should we know and trust the twitterer in question, few of them are above a little occasional mischief or immune from ever being hacked.

The second problem – and it’s admittedly a related one – is impartiality. While we all know the politics and the prejudices of The Daily Mail, our man in Tarhir Square could be a sympathiser, a plant, a rebel, an opportunist, a man with a grudge or a transvestite barber in Colorado having a laugh.

In short, we still need trusted information brands to give perspective, context and authenticity to tweeted bulletins. This is surely where our newspapers are heading. The Guardian already clearly regards itself – possibly quite rightly – as more of a brand than newspaper. The Daily Mail, perhaps counter-intuitively given its conservative stance, has arguably achieved one of the most successful online migrations of any newspaper in the world. It has shelved its more obvious partisanships (well buried them at least) and created a digital monster, becoming one of the most-well read newspapers on the net along the way.

"Blimey. That lesbian fishwife faces eviction..."

If we zip forward 20 years (maybe less), it seems unlikely that all of our newspapers (if any) will still have printed counterparts. They may well still command powerful on-line parishes, perhaps enjoying a far wider global reach than they do today, but will they still be able to prod the electorate Cameron-wards at their proprietor’s behest?

That, of course, pre-supposes that they ever could. The changes in allegiance demonstrated by the Sun for instance (Maggie, Maggie, Major-ish, Blair, Blair, Cameron) show the paper is, arguably, as keen to stay in line with its readers shifting values as it is to try and lead them by the nose. There is a tendency by the media-ocracy (particularly those on the left) to patronise the masses as blind fools spoon-fed propaganda by The Mail, who will always obligingly toddle off to the ballot box to cast their pre-programmed vote. I think that was always bollocks.

What Twitter and Facebook clearly add to the mix are other voices, other streams of information, and that can never be a bad thing. They are, however, only part of the media mix and play a role alongside newspapers and broadcasters.

In the end, I suspect, paper will prove no more of a core property of newspapers than hot metal did 30 years ago. The essential news gathering functions – and the attendant prejudices – will stay in place, but the means of distribution will be very different. We will certainly see the last printed editions of the broadsheets in our lifetimes (even, I suspect, in yours, Steve). The tabloids will, I expect, have a longer lifespan, insulated by reader preference and the ability to retain sufficient circulation to remain viable for advertisers.

Twittering individuals may emerge as reliable brands in their own right. I can see no reason why a an affiliated group of verified tweeters could not form a Reuters-like network, spanning continents and specialist areas, though funding might be an issue here.

Our passive approach to being “newsed” at by trusted sources would have to change to usher in a truly twitter-centric world, with apathy likely to count that out. Ultimately, Twitter etc will be incorporated into the way we evaluate the world. Its current pre-eminence is at least partly down to its novelty, but that will fade. In 20 years’ time, presidents might still be tweeting urgent declarations of state, but most of us will still be reading about them on secondary platforms, albeit few of them tree-related.

So yesterday's news: A tree recently