BoringLOG – Crashing in Cyberspace – One Week On

27th April 2007

The cows are lowing in the meadow, the sheep are bleating on the moor, and my beautiful mossy green lawn has been laid to waste by rampant moles who gathered round the sonic trap like spaced-out clubbers at an all-night rave…oh, God, sorry, I don’t have to write that c*** any more, do I? Mother Nature on acid.

That said, I am feeling a little despondent today and a drop of LSD could do the trick, I suppose. I have been pottering around Purplecoo dropping in here and there on people and I’m afraid I am now suffering from emotional and mental flatness. The trouble with cyberspace is that I find it totally overwhelming. I am officially classified as A Hyersensitive Person. Which basically means hellish to live with. And frequently exhausted - and exhausting. Maybe my husband’s a saint after all. Saint Nicholas – Patron Saint of? (answers on a postcard please). He’s stuck with me long enough anyway. And I put him through a merry dance for a few years. Hypersensitivity also means that I pick up on vibes that probably aren’t even there. It’s like being some sort of transistor radio. God knows what it would be like to be psychic. You wouldn’t be able to move for other people’s lives and ghosts flooding your own channels. I think I’d just explode. I had an English friend in Italy like this. It was a real burden for her. There are mediums in my family and my maternal grandmother had an uncanny sense of prediction, but I am not one of those. For me it’s more about feeling swamped by the energy of others, positive or negative and positively or negatively – depending.

I wrote a blog during my time on The Dark Side on a similar theme. I hardly dare look at it as I am no doubt repeating myself and would therefore be a useless columnist. But in the same way that I found city life, ultimately, so wearing and in the same way I can’t even look at the weekend papers through the sheer bulk of information they represent, cyberspace is, in reality, my worst nightmare. I love people and am incredibly nosey about them and bombard strangers with bizarrely detailed questions about their cleaner’s great-grandmother’s hamster. So here I am trying to whiz around like Westerwitch on a motorized broomstick trying to get to know you all and read all the details of your lives and your innermost thoughts – and remember it all! Who was the one who decided to go for a walk on the beach rather than pull out the greyhairs spotlighted by the spring sunshine? Who was it who went to Eyam plague village (up the road from me?). Who was it who was writing from Rodmell in West Sussex, which I always used to pass through on my way to the beach in the headier days of my youth? Who was it who posted a picture of a pheasant on their (rather nice looking) lawn? Who had the problem with the couch grass (I know he was male)? etc etc etc. Now, while trawling, I have the added complication of feeling a compulsion to look at everyone’s ‘profiles’. Fascinating, but just more time-consuming and dispiriting. Everyone just seems so talented and well-read and just when you think you’ve had an original thought you realise someone’s already written about it, more beautifully and interestingly than you ever could. And that’s just Purplecoo – there’s a million more other bloggers out there scribbling down their thoughts and sending them elegantly, stylishly, funnily, boringly off into the ether.

Then you have a quick shoofty round the news websites and find another overload of info, even the journos now doing blogs as if writing a column isn’t enough. And why write a blog when you write a column? Oh yes, silly me, they’re two quite different things, aren’t they?

Oh, and now I’m being told that blogging’s passé anyway. So what will be the next big thing, then? Pen and ink? Or maybe chalk and slate? I always did think the old ways were the best ways. And it would help keep the rural post offices open too. Now there’s a good original theme…

Enfin bref, as they say in France, I am feeling flat and bereft of inspiration. Talk about being a tiny fish in a big sea. I have to remind myself now why I came to the countryside – to get away from all the unwelcome ‘noise’. Noise of the planes, noise of the cars, noise of the neighbours - this I can escape: but the noise of incessant advertising and media and promotions and ‘information’ being shoved through my door or attacking me every time I set foot outside (in London) or turn on the telly or the computer or open a magazine and have a load of unsolicited flyers crash to the floor at my feet – this is harder. So much wasted paper, so much wasted ink, so much wasted money, so many wasted words. All meaningless, all not very green. And to think that I used to work in the world of communications….before the world went mad.

So I think I need to take a break, step outside onto my lovely green, mole-free lawn, look at my lovely green hills, take a deep breath of the lovely clean air and listen to the only noise I want to hear right now – the twittering birds, the bleating sheep and the lowing cattle. Ah, peace at last.