‘Mr Blue Sky‘ is a cheerful pop tune by the Electric Light Orchestra. It is entirely unconnected with Bluesky, the social media phenomenon. It’s been around for quite a while, apparently. The social media phenomenon, I mean, although Out Of The Blue, the album by the Electric Light Orchestra that includes ‘Mr Blue Sky’ came out in 1977. But I digress. Bluesky (the social media phenomenon, please do at least try to keep up at the back), was engendered as recently as 2019 by one Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter (a different social media site), as an experimental platform that allowed the lunatics to take over the asylum users to customise their experience more flexibly than Twitter allowed. but has taken off since the Fall of Western Civilisation (was it really less than a month ago?) with the mass migration from TwiXXtit of many of its more — how can I put this? — ‘intellectual’ — habitués.

Twister was already a bit of a sinkhole. Back in the day, malcontents who wished to express their views had to find a piece of paper and write on it, venting their frustration, often in green ink, and using up every square millimetre of space, after which they’d have to find an envelope; address the envelope to someone (anyone!); buy a stamp, and mail it. In those far-off days when I wrote a science column in the Times (the real one, you know, in London) I’d regularly get mail like that. The sanest letters I received were from inmates at high-security mental hospitals. Not because those correspondents yet at large were necessarily even more dribblingly insane than those who had been incarcerated, but because those who had been locked up were, presumably, taking their medication. With Twittex, anyone at all could say whatever they liked, no matter how hateful, spiteful, ill-considered or loopy, and post it to the world at almost no cost. And they had to do it in 140 characters (ah, those were the days), a limit that doesn’t leave any room for nuance. To be fair, social media have always been prone to such afflictions, as those of us who remember Usenet groups will attest. On the plus side, Tixwart became a great place for people of shared interests to congregate and swap information. People such as scientists, who can rarely afford postage stamps, and, as it happens, mainly lean to the left, and that’s not only those who happen to be Jewish and celebrating Passover (oh, if you insist, here’s a link for the goys).

The clouds gathered when a tech squillionaire called Elon Musk, famous for electric cars and re-usable space rockets, took over Titter and renamed it ‘X’. The cheerful blue bird logo was shot out of orbit by Darth Vader’s ominously black X-wing (Star Wars enthusiasts will no doubt tell me that Darth Vader didn’t fly an X-wing, but I shall ignore them). Mr Musk took perhaps a more active role in the administration of the platform than was entirely appropriate. But it got worse. Mr Musk became rather intimate with the fifthcoming forthcoming next President of the U. S. and A., a person who was voted in by millions despite the fact that his relationship with the truth is, shall we say, elastic. The Fall of Western Civilisation election happened less than a month ago, and how things have changed. Not long after that seismic event I noticed that my tally of followers on X was falling. Looking back, I had not been accruing many new ones for a while. I didn’t think it was something I said, at least, not recently, but then twigged that people were leaving X and moving to Bluesky. I set up an account on Bluesky and now have 1,000 1,100 1,200 followers, a total that seems to be rising faster than house prices in London.

Frank has in these pages talked about alternatives to X for some while (most recently Bluesky), and not long after Mr Musk took over TwitWit I set up an account on an alternative called Mastodon, which, for some reason, hasn’t taken off in quite the same way, perhaps because it’s set up as a collection of independent sub-networks, rather than as a unified entity, but maybe because it is named after an extinct species of elephant. The transition from TwerpTit to Bluesky, on the other hand, is much simpler, perhaps because it was created by the same people. There is even an extension to Chrome which, with a bit of fiddling around, involving drawing a pentagram on the floor in chalk, sacrificing a goat to Ishtar, and earthing oneself to a radiator, allows one to find those of one’s followers on Twix who already have accounts on Bluesky.

I should say that other social media accounts are available (Frank lists some I hadn’t even heard of) and it seems I have five. Or maybe six. Being as I am a recovering palaeontologist, I can reliably count to two, but counting to three or more requires me to lie down in a darkened room afterwards. Each one of my accounts serves a different purpose. Here they are, with tally of my followers.

Bluesky: The trendy alternative to Twerpix. What XTwit used to be like. I have 1,200 followers and rising.

X: The Dark Side. I peaked at just over 3,000 followers. I still have 2,928. Clearly, not all have moved to BlueSky, so I shall be keeping an eye on it still and have no immediate plans to delete it, despite the Muskiness.

Facebook: The time-hallowed way of sounding off, though in a more relaxed way than Twitter. A space which, in my experience, is more for social than professional activities, my feed is forever clogged up with adverts and suggestions for pages to follow which, no matter how hard I try to remove them, keep coming back. I have 1,300 ‘friends’, and a separate page for promoting my books, which has 470 followers.

LinkedIn: Very much geared to professionals, this is not the place where people tend to post pictures of their cats. 1,407 followers and ‘500+ connections’.

Instagram: This very much is the place where people post pictures of their cats. Or in my case, dogs. 487 followers.

A cat, recently. Also includes a dog.

Mastodon: A social media network that seems to have been eclipsed by Bluesky and is therefore arguably redundant. 48 followers.

These are clearly too many. I have resisted signing up to Threads, and TikTok is for tinies. I’d like to be able to encourage my followers on other platforms to move to Bluesky, but not all of them will. A good friend of mine on X said he wouldn’t move to Bluesky because, he said (and this is the cleaned up version) it was full of pompous sanctimonious self-important lefty scientists who were so up their own bottoms they’d settle down in there with a standard lamp, a comfy chair and a good book. So it’s clear that I am going to have to keep most of my social media accounts. Except possibly Mastodon. I think that species is  due for extinction.

I shall end with a cautionary note. Social media platforms evolve. Some stay around longer than others. Usenet groups are a thing of the past.  MySpace, anyone? Tumblr? Friendfeed? The Tale of Twittr is a cautionary one, and it’s possible, even likely, that Bluesky, too, will soon be riddled with undesirable mastodons  elephants elements. I have a suspicion that at least some of my more recent followers might be bots. Many seem anonymous; are sans profile picture or description; have no followers of their own; have made no posts; and (this is the suspicious part) seem to be following precisely 51 people.

The Electric Light Orchestra predicted this a long time ago. As the lyric to ‘Mr Blue Sky’ has it

Mr. Blue, you did it right
But soon comes Mr. Night creepin’ over
Now his hand is on your shoulder
Never mind, I’ll remember you this
I’ll remember you this way.

Jasper Fforde: The Eyre Affair This knockabout whimsy was given to me by a colleague, Mr C. S. of Borehamwood, for my entertainment when I was off work with depression over a decade ago. I cannot say why I picked it up now, but I am glad I did. It’s set in England in an alternate 1985, in which literary investigator Thursday Next has a lot on her plate. A veteran of the ongoing Crimean War, she has to work out who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays; find some way to make it up with her equally-war-scarred Crimean veteran boyfriend; and venture into the closed communist republic of Wales to  track down arch-villain Acheron Hades, who has stolen the original manuscript of Jane Eyre.  Hades has also stolen a device powered by bookworms that will allow him to get inside the novel and kidnap the heroine, altering the novel beyond repair. That he has already abducted a minor character in Martin Chuzzlewit shows that he means business. It is gloriously silly, and there are episodes that are pure Python (sensu Monty):

‘Home news now, and violence flared again in Chichester as a group of neo-surrealists gathered to celebrate the legalisation of surrealism. On the spot for Toad News Network is Henry Grubb. Henry, how are things down there?’ A shaky live picture came on to the screen, and I stopped for a moment to watch. Behind Grubb was a car that had been set on fire, and several officers were in riot gear… ‘Things are a bit hot down here, Brian. I’m a hundred yards from the riot zone … This evening several hundred Raphaelites surrounded the N’est pas une pipe public house where a hundred neo-surrealists have barricaded themselves in. The demonstrators outside chanted Italian Renaissance slogans and then stones and missiles were thrown.  The neo-surrealists responded by charging the lines protected by large soft watches and seemed to winning until the police moved in …’

Fans of Terry Pratchett, Robert Rankin, Spike Milligan and Tom Holt will love it. And so will everyone else.

Isabella Tree: Wilding Something happened just after I finished reading this book that made me incandescent with fury rather cross. It was news reports from South Wales where homes and businesses had been wrecked by floods from Storm Bert, mere years after having recovered from floods set off by Storm Desmond [honestly, who thinks up these names? — Ed]. All the talk was of strengthening flood defences, which costs £££, when it seems clear that to me (nobody mentioned this on the news) that this is precisely what one should not do.

Ever since Victorian times, engineers have followed the mantra that surface water should be removed as quickly as possible. To this end they have drained marshes, wetlands and water-meadows, and canalised rivers into narrow, straight courses. So now, when rivers flood, the water doesn’t do what it once did — hang around in pools, soak into the ground, and meander. Instead, rivers, now confined by hard engineering, rise rapidly and overtop their banks.

The solutions are, tragically, close at hand, more effective, and much cheaper. Flood defences should be torn down, not built higher. Rivers should be allowed to relax. If necessary, people should be relocated to higher ground. At the very least, they should be discouraged from paving their front yards to make hard standing, so rainwater can soak into the ground. Trees should be planted on slopes to stabilise soil. Fields should be allowed to revert to wetland. Beavers should be reintroduced to dam streams, slowing river flow.

And if you, as a local planning officer,  really are going to be so idiotic as to allow developers to build on floodplains (the clue’s in the name — well, duh)  dictate that they don’t build yet more depressing estates of identikit boxes, but apply some design and engineering thought, and put them on stilts, with an undercroft, so the water can flow underneath. For goodness sake, Grand Designs has been on our screens for a quarter of a century, but for all that it’s had any influence, developers and planning departments obviously do things with their eyes shut. That nobody seems able to understand this is what makes me so angry. Oh, and farmers should allow unproductive or marginal farmland to go a bit wild at the edges. As Isabella Tree shows in this amazing and inspirational book, doing these things improves biodiversity as well as water quality, softens water flow and prevents flooding.

Despite her name, Tree is not a tree-hugging eco-warrior. She was forced to rewild when increasing debt forced her and her farmer husband Charlie Burrell into a corner. The Burrell family had been farming several thousand acres on the River Adur in West Sussex for generations. Before that, the area had been a hunting forest, back to the time of King John. By the end of the twentieth century, the thick, clayey soil was exhausted, and no amount of fertilisers, weedkillers and machinery was going to produce the yield of cereals required to meet their growing debts.

The Burrells were up against it.

Letting the farm go wild was their only option. What was so amazing was the disbelief and occasional hostility of their farming neighbours, who thought that allowing farmland go back to nature was, somehow, against nature. People — and not just the public, but conservationists — think that the countryside they grew up in has always been like that, and therefore should be preserved in that state, as if in aspic. In reality, the environment has always been changing. What conservationists think of as the natural habitat of endangered Species X is, more than likely, a degraded remnant that’s far from that species’ preferred surroundings.

Tree tells the story of how the land occupied by the farm was (and is) gradually returning to its natural state. Doing this isn’t cheap, and requires funding from various bodies who, initially (and puzzlingly) were, if not as aghast as the Burrell’s neighbours, still required a lot of convincing. But slowly, slowly, the Burrells are winning.

She also dispels two other big lies. One is the myth that Europe was once covered in dense, primeval forest, when the habitat was more likely to have been a mixture of woods and open country, what she calls ‘pasture’, an environment kept ever changing by the activities of animals within it, such as wild boar, deer, beaver and bison.

Second is the seeming need of all farmers to make every square inch of the land productive, irrespective of  its suitability. She traces this attitude back to the Second World War, when Britain, importing most of its food and completely isolated, had to become largely self sufficient. The ‘Dig fo Victory’ attitude has persisted, even though the world now produces more than enough food, and farmers are (or have been until recently) subsidised by the EU’s frankly criminal Common Agricultural Policy, which at one point swallowed more than half the entire EU budget, such that farmers were paid to grow as many crops as possible, with all that implies for use of pesticides and herbicides — when a lot of the food simply went to waste.

Rewilding your land seemed like a romantic dream. In current circumstances, discussions around land use are needed more than ever to inject a dose of reality into the minds of farmers, conservationists, politicians and the public.