Twitter

‘No, I do not do WhatsApp.’ That’s pretty much all I ever seem to say to people nowadays. They ask me if I do WhatsApp, I say I don’t do WhatsApp and they never bother with me again. I deduce from this that not only can we not now meet in person (so 80s), we cannot talk on the mobile phone either (so 90s), and nor can we email each other (so noughties). We have to do WhatsApp. I don’t know what WhatsApp is and I cannot bring myself to find out. In answer to the next person who asks, I say: WtfApp! WhocaresApp?! GetalifeApp!! I was full up with pointless technology when I got as far as using an iPhone.

After hitting me with the cancer diagnosis, the urologist offered me the choice of a longer life in exchange for my testosterone production. After some soul-searching, I agreed. I’ve been on testosterone-suppressing injections and tablets for exactly two years. The urologist has fulfilled his side of our Faustian pact. I’m still here. And everyone seems to agree that that’s the main thing. At the same time as I was diagnosed, then agreed to have my testosterone reduced to castrate levels, I asked whether there would be any side effects apart from the obvious. And I’m almost certain that someone, perhaps a nurse, said that I might find crossword puzzles more difficult. In other words, the outer reaches of my vocabulary could become less accessible.

While Mr S is used to reporting from the sideline on Twitter wars, he tends to refrain from taking part in them. So Steerpike was amused to find himself in Louise Mensch's firing line this morning. His sin? Being Peter Hitchens, apparently. Mensch accused the Mail on Sunday columnist of being the author of this very column. She said that unlike Hitchens, she didn't write stories about him. When Hitchens pointed out that he hadn't written about Mensch for seven years, the former Tory MP suggested that he was in fact... Mr Steerpike: https://twitter.com/LouiseMensch/status/611841143047880705 https://twitter.

Question: which comes out worse from the Tim Hunt affair – the lynch mob on Twitter which brought him down, or University College London, which pulled the rug from under both him and his immunologist wife once they gathered that one of their own had said something off message? It’s a tough call, but I reckon, UCL, on the basis that it formerly had some academic and intellectual credibility whereas rationality was never the strong suit of the Twitter mob - the contemporary equivalent of the women who, in Greek myth, tore Orpheus to pieces for reason’s we’d better not go into. Tim Hunt and Mary Collins have had their say in the papers over the weekend, in The Guardian and the Mail on Sunday, and the pieces make heartbreaking reading.

For the first time since the terrorist attack on the Sri Lankan team six years ago, a Test match side has visited Pakistan. The Zimbabwe tourists, playing at the same Lahore stadium where the attack was mounted, were greeted with wild enthusiasm. Less well reported has been the fact that a team of English cricketers (including myself and Alex Massie of this parish) has been touring the Hindu Kush. We played in Chitral, Drosh, Ayun, Kalash and Booni. In these mountain areas many of our opponents were using pads, gloves and a hard ball for the first time. Still, we were overwhelmed, rarely losing by fewer than 200 runs in games which never exceeded 30 overs.

Something incredible happened today: the Twitterati - used to passing mob justice on telly, celebs and politics - turned their attention to poetry. More specifically a poem in the London Review of Books by Craig Raine. How Mr S's heart leapt as he saw Raine's name trending up there with Andy Coulson and #NationalRunningDay, could it be that an English poet was proving more popular than the Kardashians? Alas not. There had not been a significant boost in the cultural tastes of the keyboard warriors. Instead they were raging after poetry critic Charles Whalley tweeted Raine's poem 'Gatwick', describing it as 'grim'. The poem describes his attraction to a young woman. It includes the line 'I want to say I like your big bust': https://twitter.

I know we’re all supposed to be spitting blood over Katie Hopkins’ Sun column about African migrants. In fact, anyone who isn’t currently testing the durability of their computer keyboard by bashing out Hopkins-mauling tweets risks having their moral decency called into question. Hating Katie has become the speediest shortcut to the moral highground in this slacktivist age, when people prefer to make a virtual advert of their moral correctness than to do anything so tough as try to change the world outside their bedroom door. And if you aren’t hating Katie, if you aren’t partaking in this orgy of competitive benevolence, what is wrong with you?

A strange ritual takes place on Twitter most evenings at around 10.30 p.m. Hundreds of political anoraks start tweeting the results of the YouGov daily tracker poll due to be published in the following day’s Sun. Some of them are neutrals, but the majority are politically aligned and will only tweet those results that show their party in front. I often wonder what the point of this is, even though I’m guilty of it myself. It’s not as if anyone is going to see the tweet and say, ‘Ooh, I wasn’t going to vote Conservative, but now that YouGov has them two points ahead I’ve changed my mind.’ I can think of only two sensible reasons for doing this, both quite weak. The first is it has a mildly demoralising effect on your opponents.

This week I would like you to share the deep pain of a liberal who has been called ‘right-wing’. This is a terrible thing to happen. It is hard to think of anything worse. There you are, being dutifully liberal all over the place and suddenly, perhaps inadvertently, you divest yourself of the opinion that — for example — Islam may, in some way, have some sort of weird, unfathomable connection to the jihadists of the Islamic State and kaboom, your credibility is blown to shreds. All of a sudden people are calling you horrible names online, like ‘right wing’. People who are quite like you calling you this. Nice, bien-pensant people with adorable views. This has happened to a chap called Tim Lott, a journalist for one of our regional newspapers.