I Follow But Never To Catch

“Following” celebs is not cool. Not by any stretch of the imagination.

But we all do it, right?

I do. I admit that I do. Facebook... Twitter... Some of the people I follow are TV people. Slebs. Stars.

But I feel kind of... bad for doing it. Diminished. Dirty. There’s something sad about it.

But I do draw the line at trying to engage them in conversation. That for me is the ultimate no-no. But plainly other people have a lower shame-threshold than I do. Every day these celebrity Twitter users are bombarded with hundreds of comments and pleas for attention. Please notice me Stephen Fry! Please reply to my comment Kirstie Allsopp about how gorgeous I think you are!

Take Julia Bradbury (and believe me, I’d like to). She regularly posts on Twitter and links out to photos she’s taken while filming. Within ten minutes I can guarantee there’ll be at least 50 comments along the lines of “you look great!”, “You look wonderful, Julia!” and “I love your TV work, Jules!”

Whilst I agree with the sentiments I can feel my scorn-face blowing a biggy. Sad sacks the lot of them! Get a life! These comments smack of the worst kind of desperation and sycophantic fan-dom. Oh please look down and notice me from your vaunted high position in Tellyland! Hey guys! Stephen Fry replied to my comment! I finally have self esteem bestowed upon me! I’m finally a somebody!

No. You’re not. You’re a sad little star pandering git.

So why do I Follow these people then if I’m so sneering about other people who do the same? Well, as I said, I don’t myself try and engage them in conversation but I do like the insider’s eye it sometimes opens on the TV industry; I like getting tip-offs about new programmes that are in the pipeline and, yes, I love it when an honest opinion is offered on another celeb or TV programme. I guess it’s like a soundbite version of Heat magazine for people who are too snobby to actually buy Heat magazine (like me).

But does that make me any better than Jonathan from Norwich who has promised to buy Julia Bradbury a pint should she ever find herself filming “down his way”? (Yeah, right, as if, Jonathan.)

I mean, in one of my comments on my previous post I was rather smug about revealing that Stephen Fry Follows me back on Twitter. Is my ego really so reliant on celeb approval? I mean let’s be honest. Stephen Fry Following me back says more about Fry’s innate niceness than it does about me being somehow noteworthy.

And just mentioning it in the first place kind of makes me a sad sack too. Doesn’t it?

And yet Twitter is capitalizing on this trend. For some time now it has offered suggestions on stars it thinks we all might like to Follow. Every day more and more celebs are signing up – solely one suspects to get Followed. It’s a free self-publicity machine after all. Ah how Twitter must love Stephen Fry for popularizing this whole star Following thing in the first place.

Should we be colluding in this? Isn’t it all a bit incestuous and self absorbed? Herd instinct given an e-makeover?

For the few of you out there whose Facebook and Twitter friends are purely people that you actually know and interact with in the real world... Respect.

For the rest of you: please stop bombarding Julia Bradbury with your inane, nobby-no-mates, pathetic “I’m a lonely cyber geek” drivel; my overtures to her are being totally ignored as a consequence.

Julia, when you’re ready, please Follow me back (Stephen Fry thinks I’m OK)!

The Death Of Magic

When I was an impressionable teen I got into magic. Or rather the idea of magic. In fact this occult interest lasted well into my impressionable twenties.

At the time the occult section of Waterstones (now, I believe, respectably entitled “Health, Body and Spirit” or some such) was bursting at its magical seams with middle class grimoires from the likes of Laurie Cabot and other darker tomes from the late, great and dangerous-to-know Aleister Crowley, who is in fact a fellow Leamingtonian.

I have to say I was swept along more by the theory than the practice though I do recall once going into an “alternative” shop in York and buying a wand that looked like a Native American phallus. All dangly feathers and a ruddy great bulbous crystal sprouting from the end of it. It languished under my bed for years until I offloaded it onto a kooky ex back in 2003. I don’t miss it at all.

As for Crowley... well I was never tempted to try out any of his Magick™, beleaguered as it was with demons, drugs and downright moral depravity but I did purchase a lot of his books. I got about 2 thirds through his immense autohagiography (for those of you who don’t know an autohagiography is supposedly the biography of a saint) before getting bogged down in lengthy "he said / she said" transcripts of various conversations Aleister had enjoyed in various privileged gentleman’s clubs across Europe. It all got a bit stuffy. I just wanted the salacious bedroom exploits and the otherworldly descriptions of the Abyss not the scripts from an Open University staff meeting.

I still own the books and have a few rarities too including a copy of his very dirty poem “Leah Sublime” (which in the modern age is no worse than a 6th form Rugby song).

I keep them now not out or any respect for magical lore but as interesting historical documents. As a figure Aleister Crowley has, I think, stood the test of time. The magical theories, I’m afraid, I now view as complete bunkum. It’s plainly obvious that Crowley was doped to his eyeballs most of the time on heroin and cocaine and various other Victorian opiates and spent a great deal of his time reading esoteric texts and then hallucinating as a direct consequence.

One story from the autohag is a case in point:

Aleister recounts an occasion when he saved a man servant’s life by wrestling a demon to the ground. It’s one of the signature notes of his autohag and makes a great read. However, that same man servant later independently recounts Aleister taking various drugs and then suddenly attacking him. The man servant was lucky to get away with his life, his dignity and his virtue intact. Enough said.

But there was more to Aleister than the dodgy magic. There was philosophy, literature, appalling poetry and a rock and roll lifestyle a good 60 years before rock and roll was even invented. He’s a genuinely interesting character and I may write more about him in the future but don’t have the room or the time now.

Laurie Cabot – an American white witch – is another case entirely. Stephen Fry met her earlier this year during one of his televised road trips across the States and she came across as an aging nutter who spent her time living in a yurt for the tourists and touting feather-based love charms for the sad, lonely and financially incontinent.

I can’t believe I ever fell for any of that crap. It all seems utterly ridiculous now.

Me and magic have, alas, parted company. I’m no longer a believer.

Which isn’t to say I don’t keep an open mind on ghosts, UFOs, and other paranormal oddities.

But magic... magic I’d like to believe in but sadly just don’t anymore. I’ve grown out of it. It’s a young man’s dream, borne out of ignorance and wishful thinking; a desire to control the uncontrollable.

Nowadays I’m more accepting of the uncontrollable. In fact part of me is rather glad that there are some things beyond my control – I can take neither responsibility nor blame for them. It’s an immense relief.

And yet...

...and yet there is a tiny part of me that is sad that I have lost this wide eyed belief in magic. The world seems a little smaller, a little greyer as a consequence. It’s like figuring out the true identity of Father Christmas. You still get the presents. Nothing physically changes in the world.

But the magic has gone.