The celebrant’s smile dips occasionally, but for the entire service never completely disappears. There are so many people here I know, friends, friends of friends, anonymous familiar faces, total strangers, all dressed up in our smartest clothes. I keep an iron grip on my friend L’s hand, and she on mine, as we watch the family walk up the aisle, our lost friend’s two young children walking towards something I cannot — literally cannot, cannot permit myself to — imagine.

The last funeral I went to before this was a woman in her nineties, a great-grandmother, a brilliantly intelligent professional, her life shaped by sacrifice and generosity. I am there for her grandson, one of my oldest friends, but during the service I remember so much I had forgotten, or never appreciated: how on more than one Christmas Day I had turned up on her doorstep, mid-afternoon, and she had sat me down with her family and fed me, without ever asking me anything or questioning my presence, just offering consummate ξενία; how we would all stay for days there, on holiday from school and university, drinking the family booze and filling their ashtrays, eating all their leftovers in 2am feasts; how she always knew who I was but never made me feel I owed her more than a polite hello, something that, as a teenager, seemed more valuable than gold. All through those years, more than a decade of my giddiness and misery, she had provided a sanctuary so perfect I had never even registered it. Her own family, children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all had something of her goodness, remembering and greeting me though another decade had passed, at least, since I’d seen many of them. What a life, I thought, what richness and jewels and precious treasure she had collected, and been given. To live more than ninety years and know the good you have wrought must be nice, I thought.

This week, this funeral, we drive to the wake, L in the passenger seat, her ex and their son in the back. Her ex says, Do you know she was like? One word. Really good. Her son says, That’s two words, Dad. We collapse into that post-funeral hysteria which is already familiar — chattering teeth and unstoppable laughter — and I think, What a life. What a life.

I’ve spent the last few months entirely off social media, months that I’ve been instead using for reading, writing a screenplay, grieving a pal, listening to podcasts, going outside, walking, hanging out with my friends and family, picking apples, going for runs, writing cards, writing lists.

It’s been bliss.

Here are some thoughts that have begun to coalesce in my mind during that time:

1. Instagram seems like the least hostile social media app, going by who I follow, but when I’ve opened it recently I’ve felt like my disgruntled old white dad™ complaining about The Youth. “But why are you taking a photograph of your food? Your blanket? Your train journey? Who cares about it? Why can’t you just enjoy your holiday? Who are you writing this to?” 

2. I think one of the reason it bothers me is that so many of the people I follow who talk about anxiety and mental health issues are also the most prolific posters, particularly of selfies. I wonder if we’ll look back on this era of internet-use and marvel that it wasn’t obvious, a direct correlation between filming/photographing yourself and waiting for comments and likes, and anxiety and mental health issues. 

3. In the first episode of Morality in the 21st Century, the much-discussed and critiqued author Jordan Peterson talks to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks about how we now put far too much emphasis on Happiness, way beyond Responsibility. How fulfilment and the pleasure of life comes from accepting and handling responsibility, not chasing constant ‘happiness and rights’. Peterson also says kids shouldn’t be told they are perfect and that they should love themselves unconditionally because self-esteem is so important, but instead that they are full of potential, and have a responsibility to tap into that infinite potential to grow into the best possible version of themselves within and against the problems and issues they’ll come up against. I dig this. 

4. I try to raise our kids to be like Paddington. Open-hearted, hopeful, adventurous, curious, moral, questioning, kind. I don’t know if it’ll work. But it helps to have a plan. 

5. I want to side with my generation and younger. My optimism says that young people have fresh ideas, open minds, new ways of understanding old bigotries are no longer acceptable. Young people shouldn’t be dictated to about what is and isn’t acceptable by older generations who don’t understand and haven’t grown up with technology in the same way. But for all that optimism, I realise I’ve thrown out the idea of Wisdom. If anyone older than us says anything we don’t agree with, it’s way easier to say, “OMG the 1800s called and want their ideology back.” But maybe they know something. Maybe it is super rude and disconnected for a family to sit together on a sofa all on separate tablets and phones. Maybe it’s not acceptable for everyone to have their phones out on the table when they’re out for dinner. Maybe we should be able to unplug and walk outside in the fresh air without having to take seventeen pictures of it, select our favourite, caption it, publish it, then check and respond to comments. Maybe living a life through images and captions isn’t how our human brains work best. 

6. (Maybe it also makes you a little bit boring.) 

7. I still grieve for Twitter — even though even glimpsing four tweets on my feed now makes my heart pound and race at the sheer teeth-bared ferocity of it — but I miss the memes and the humour, the people I met there and the opinions I discovered. I love that it gives previously silenced people a vital platform. That’s so important. I can’t say that enough. That’s SO important. 

8. But! Of course, but! Having a platform for everyone means that everyone has a platform. And actually, I feel that’s less good. But I don’t know how to fix that, or run it better. Gatekeepers aren’t the answer. Moral responsibility? “Do I need to post this?” Does it make the world better? Is calling someone trash when they’ve done something ‘wrong’ the right way to live? Do you ever worry that one day it’ll be you? 

9. I do, loads. The more that people are deleted for their errors — a word, a tweet, a joke, a routine, a casting decision, a drunken error — jesus christ, when I think of all my drunken errors and jokes and god, all my mistakes, my god — the more I wonder how anyone dares use social media. (I will shortly be crowd-funding my family’s move to a signal-less home on a hill in beautiful Wales.)

10. This makes me feel like all the people we used to loathe and make fun of, in my Twitter days. Just don’t be human garbage! The rules aren’t hard! But they really, really are. 

11. Do you remember when we disagreed with things and said to people or companies, “Do you think you might -” or “Please could you consider -”? It feels — and I haven’t crunched the numbers! I don’t know if this is nonsense! I hope it is! — that we go full-throttle straight to SIGN THIS PETITION TO GET THIS SHUT DOWN. I like it more when we talk about things. We all need to be challenged.  

12. This is an excellent programme on the vital importance of Dialogue. While I’ve been offline I’m been meeting so many people to just chat and hang out and it turns out it’s great. We should do that more. (*extremely high pitched suggestion voice* And maybe not put that we did it on social media??)

13. These apps are engineered by the top engineers to be addictive. It doesn’t mean they fulfil you. 

14. I, like most late-twentieth-century babies, went through an anti-religion phase. Now, most of the religious people I know are the ones I feel best after seeing. Their quiet charity. Their humility. Their morals. It’s not a sword they use to strike people, it’s an umbrella they offer to hold over those who want it. It’s pretty nice. (And I’d love to discuss with people who have greater expertise than me about whether the fact that almost all religions across the last few thousand years have said vanity/self-indulgence are Not Good Things is suggestive that maybe we should avoid those for our greater benefit, or whether those taboos have been tools of oppression. Both? Probably. I would like to learn more, though.) 

15. Getting paid and credited for your work is important — god knows, I try to make my living in a field where anyone who speaks English is convinced they can do it NO YOU CANNOT — but entering an Instagram space where everyone, always, bangs their own drum is so tiresome. I know I can unfollow them. But how much can that behaviour be repeated and normalised before we forget it’s not the way to shape a pleasant society? And yes, I am also a bitter writer who is not yet rolling in my own Scrooge McDuck coin vault so that’s probably part of it. I don’t even remember the original question asked here, but I think about paragraphs 11 & 12 of the answer all the time. When did ‘building your brand’ replace being an actual person? And I know I’m on thin ice here, I can already hear the retorts, and yes, I am 187 years old, thank you for asking. 

16. I am so, so, so worried about the planet. Everything else kind of feels like small fry, in a way. Please stop encouraging people to buy so much shit. It might be your living but we are literally, literally destroying the only place we have to live. I just don’t get why this isn’t the only thing we are all working on, all the time. (I mean, I get why, but also, WHY?) That Morality podcast I mentioned earlier has an interesting discussion on the value of capitalism that utterly fails to reference the fairly pressing point of “it’s basically ending humanity with its poisoning of water, air and land”. 

17. If I’m not writing, I want to spend my time making things with my hands. This podcast posits that the thing that makes humans happiest to hold is a wooden object. Fuck you, Apple designers! Lol. Anyway, I could believe it. I want to carve wood for a useful purpose and make things from clay and repair things with beautiful stitches and fix objects so they are useful and gorgeous. 

18. Picking and forming teams seems dangerous. It means the other teams are your enemy. That they can’t understand you, that you don’t get them, and that ultimately you aren’t on the same side. 

19. Someone disagreeing with you is not your enemy. It is not a weakness nor an act of aggression to say, “I’m not sure about this. I feel this way at the moment, but I’d like to know more.”  

20. I think if we talk a lot about Fear and Hate and Catastrophe it’s hard to see around those words to what we can do as individual people, rather than being stuck on one side or another of them. It doesn’t mean we ignore those issues: maybe we just try to listen to people we disagree with more. 

21. When I was young, books and films and culture told me that you know less as you get older, not more. Ha! Boy, did they have that wrong! I learned more every day! 

22. Up to a point. Now I know almost nothing, except that at the moment I believe Paddington to be a suitable role-model for my kids, and that there is almost never a clear right answer to anything. 

23. I don’t know how much of this is right. 

Here are the podcasts I’ve mentioned: 

Hidden Brain, Our Better Nature 

Morality in the 21st Century, episode 1

Hidden Brain, The Cassandra Curse 

The Persistence of Analogue 

Double-Talk - I’m really sorry, this isn’t available to download. Darn it. But if you meet me in a caff you can listen to it on my headphones. It’s worth it for the price of a £1.80 latte. 

January does as January does, and transforms me into a desiccated, misanthropic husk. Body and brain are torn between usual hormonal Hulk rage and something deeper, a throbbing growl against everyone I look at. My body is under enormous muscular tension as I continually hold back from screaming into the face of anyone foolish enough to try to talk to me; unfollowing people on Instagram helps; watching a lot of TV helps too, for a while, and then I am struck by the fact that I will never write anything this good, even when I’m watching the worst thing on Netflix, and that the only thing I have ever wanted to do is not something I’ll ever do well. 

I sit in the car in a school car park with two children in the back, waiting for a third, and try to cry, until one of the passengers asks what a kazoo is and my startlingly accurate impression halts my momentum. Another moment later, though, and I soundlessly succeed, and it is briefly satisfying.

Porridge has got into my brain, or reality, or both — my usual unearned confidence and optimism about my ability to develop as a writer has evaporated. I think of the writers I love, and realise that my writing is sludge, mediocre and thin-soup readable at best, boring and self-indulgent at worst. (The concept of #selfcare is making my blood fucking boil at the moment, in a larger-picture-way, but I have the creeping horrors that my writing is the literary equivalent of a Instagram make-sure-you’re-looking-after-you post.) I am jealous, but still happy, for those brilliant writers in my life who have found success; the fellow-mediocre — and worse — writers who have found the same just make me endlessly, crushingly sad. I miss the friends and family I do not see enough, and am having a teen-like grieving period for the fact that everything comes to an end. All of this is written horribly, clumsily. Even the dog has moved her regular lapdog position to the hot air vent in the floor, just to get away from my mood.  

But one of the children asks me how much it costs to get one’s ears pierced, and when I guess twenty pounds they say, ‘Twenty pounds! You should get an ear pierce and a hair cut and a sarcasm removal for that!’; and one child gives me a huge hug when they see me crying in the kitchen; and it is so nice when my roommate comes home at the end of the day; and I have some nice work on; and my mother is back from a six-week trip tomorrow; and even if I can’t write a good book, I have so very many to read. Some seed of optimism remains for the start of Spring.