I realise that by logical extension I am odd too, but I’m not. I am normal. Ordinary even. I have no doubt that some people think I am odd and that is their prerogative, but they are wrong. This is not a new thing, I have known this for a long time. The reason I am writing about it now is that I received a stark, if not humorous, reminder today in of all places – wait for it, you’ll gasp – Twitter.

Before you chime in with the, “but any fule knos that Twitter is full of oddballs”” and variations thereof, I agree. In its defence, Twitter also has as many non-oddballs, is a great source of news, support, community, academia and so on. However, like many open platforms the oddo’s seem to be that much more excitable than usual. Being easily excited, getting worked into a froth, having no perspective, and generally raging against the machine consumes far more energy and requires a disproportionate amount of space and attention. Like a bigger flame requires more oxygen, the shoutiest, meanest, and the most thoughtless people on Twitter consume more than an equal share of the bandwidth. This in turn means that the reasonable voices are less well heard as they are being suffocated by the lunatics. The loons drown out the sensible people. T’was ever thus.

On this particular occasion I was reading a thread about the fact that one of our glorious government cabinet members had apparently announced something, in an apparently laughably inappropriate setting, about the latest wonder drug for Covid-19 sufferers, dexamethasone. Notwithstanding the fact that the photo may not have been of this, for there was no way of telling, it hadn’t prevented people from piling in. One of them had even gone to that paragon of reliable information and screenshotted the Wikipedia list of side effects. Before I knew what had happened I had arched an eyebrow and dashed of a response similar to, “Wiki is the source you choose to cite?”. A relatively polite to and fro ensued where it became increasingly evident that they had no idea what they were talking about and then, apropos of nothing I had said, advanced the idea that they would like to see ‘natural’ remedies or even homeopathy being endorsed by the government as viable Covid treatments. I bit my knuckle and refrained from replying. They were sounding just slightly ill-informed and as it turns out they were a Grade-A oddball masquerading as a normal person. Homeopathy has been scientifically discredited beyond a shadow of a doubt. Serious advocates of it as a treatment option are obviously very odd.

All is good. I have declined to engage and neither do they.  Scroll forward 24h though and a message pops up from a randommer who had read my little to and fro with the believer in homeopathy and just gets stuck right in with the abuse. Knowing nothing about me they have gone all in, “I have read your blog, it is terrible, you think you are good with words, don’t give up the day job, how dare you sneer at Wikipedia etc.” I stopped, thought for a moment, and then burst out laughing.

I have no idea of their relationship with the original interlocutor, I know nothing about them and frankly, can’t be arsed to dig into some random frother on Twitter to try and get a, “my dad is bigger that your dad” retort filed. But, they obviously felt it necessary to do so, read some of my blog and then do their best at a vile response. Quite what they had hoped to achieve escapes me. It did, however, give me this idea for a short post and for that I am grateful.

Twitter is like the flame for the oddest of moths and sometimes it is good to be reminded of the dual role of news, banter, pithy remarks for some set against that of the seemingly bottomless cesspool of unpleasantness it is for some others.