Twitter’s sofa forts and fistfuls of carrot sticks were fun until the trolls took over

TWO days in and there’s still a dull ache, a regular urge to waggle an arm that I then joltingly remember isn’t there any more. Actually, it feels not so much like a phantom limb as a phantom brain: a set of neural pathways suddenly rendered obsolete, a team of crack Numskulls given their marching orders, a psychological Ravenscraig. On Saturday, I deleted my Twitter account.

I suspect you’re responding to this in one of two ways (three, if you’re thinking, ‘What’s Twitter?’). Many good, sensible people among you, alive to the trends and habits of the new century, cognisant of the pleasures and conveniences instant digital communication has brought to humanity, will nonetheless be delivering a mental slap across my chops accompanied by a barked: ‘Pull yourself together, man!’

But those of you for whom social media has become a fundamental part of daily existence will understand my trauma.

I spent my first year on Twitter anonymously ‘lurking’ as @albythecat – observing without contributing. Then, urged on by friends, I set aside my fears about privacy and decided to go for it. I changed my handle to @chrisdeerin, clicked on the symbol of a quill, bashed out my first 140-character tweet – and never looked back.

And I was good at it. By the time I clicked ‘deactivate account’ at the weekend, I had more than 10,000 followers, which, while considerably less than, say, Taylor Swift or Nicola Sturgeon or a contestant from The Great British Bake Off, put me towards the upper end of the scale.

Members of the Twitter ‘elite’ followed me – famous writers, musicians, comedians, politicians and journalists. If I had a style, I suppose it was a mix of nonsensical whimsy, ranty political opinions and the constant search for good novels to read.

I made loads of new pals, too. The great thing about Twitter – and Twitter truly is great – is that due to its instantaneousness, its 24-hour relentlessness and its sharp, sassy user demographic, it delivers to you the authentic person, the genuine thought process, warts and all.

I can’t think of anyone I’ve gone on to meet in real life (or irl, as tweeters say) who hasn’t been exactly as I expected. Twitter is a ruthless pretension killer, a consummate bull**** detector, a bear trap for idiocy. The journalist Euan McColm captured it perfectly when he described it as ‘a dating service for friends’.

It’s made me a better hack, too. In the old days, one would chisel one’s column on a tablet of stone and then hand it down to the little reader with something approaching Olympian condescension.

These days, the scale is reversed: the reader dwarfs the writer. There are always experts who know far more about your chosen subject than you do and who are more than happy to take to social media to put you right on your sloppy facts or lazy misunderstandings. Just try printing an opinion on the NHS, or the education system, or whether it’s OK for a chap to wear cords.

Thinking back, all of my favourite Twitter moments involved extreme silliness. There was the time I posted a photo of a bag of carrot sticks and asked for predictions of how many I’d be able to hold in one hand, with a prize for whoever got closest. Lots of people had a go (from memory, I managed 27).

However, I hold that my greatest achievement – perhaps in any medium – was the sofa fort caper.

Bored and alone in a pub in Stirling, I chanced on a graphic showing how to create a ‘fort’ using the cushions on your couch. I ended up with a timeline full of images of erstwhile serious and highachieving individuals from all over the planet sitting inside their hastily constructed efforts. This is what it is to be human, I thought. I felt a profound species-pride.

But doing Twitter properly comes at a price, or at least it did for me. I’ve always envied those smooth, controlled Southern types who’ll stick at just the one pint, who can use the phrase ‘ moderation in all things’ without winking to camera.

My roiling Celtic blood drives me in the opposite direction: what’s the point in having just one pint? Where’s the fun in being moderate? You can probably see where I’m going with this.

Twitter became the first thing I looked at on waking and the last thing I looked at before going to sleep. It was also the place I spent most of the hours in between.

It’s an incredibly addictive environment: it it’s full of clever, funny people being clever a and funny. It lets you look in on your heroes and even chat to them. If you’re in the mood (and I often am) there’s always a scrap to be had. It keeps you up to speed o on everything that’s going on and that m matters, in real time.

In some ways, it’s like an upgraded, wishfu fulfilled version of the physical world.

So why have I left? In part, due to the reasons outlined above. Time for a bit of reprioritisation – I’m quite excited at the thought of reintroducing myself to my children, for example. I might get round to reading some of those recommended novels. I might even go outside.

But I’ve also found that Twitter has changed in the past year. It has become a harder and angrier place.

The nastiness and aggression of the cybernats during the referendum campaign was one thing. They are an odd, unpleasant and intellectually limited bunch – but at least the existential nature of the issue justified the engagement.

In recent months, though, this tiresome trend has spread south as the Corbynites – effectively cybernats without the whisky tears – have risen. My Twitter feed became a conveyor belt of anti- semites, moral relativists, America-haters and pop-eyed ideologues spewing tedious old guff.

It wasn’t just dispiriting; it was boring. And I got fed up blocking idiots.

So I decided it was best just to leave them to it, and to leave. To be truthful, I’m not quite sure how it works from here.

In William Boyd’s novel Ordinary Thunderstorms, a character on the lam states, ‘No cheques, no bills, no references, no mobile phone calls – only payphones – no credit cards, only cash – nothing. That’s how you disappear in the 21st century – you just refuse to take part in it.’ I feel a bit like that: like I’ve just refused to take part in the 21st century.

But on the upside, in the past couple of days I’ve got two-thirds of the way through the excellent new William Boyd, Sweet Caress. It really is very good. Do me a favour and recommend it on Twitter.