James Burton

Social Networking Can Seriously Damage Your Social Health

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:03:00 GMT

I keep thinking about deleting my Myspace account. It’s been active for a couple of years or so now, and I very rarely logon to it, so I’m really not sure what the point in keeping it up and running is.

At first it was good fun – a useful way to get in touch with old friends and communicate with current ones, although hardly essential when a phone call or text message would serve the same purpose. However, the novelty of Myspace has long since worn off.

Numerous old acquaintances got in touch with me, and I with them, but the exchange of messages invariably followed the same routine. First there’s the obligatory “haven’t seen you in ages, how have you been” chat, followed by some mildly enjoyable reminiscing, then finally the inevitable “we should meet up”. At this stage the messages tended to dry up. Rarely did I ever intend to actually meet up with the person, but it felt like the right thing to say. I did catch up with one old friend, but such was the time that had passed since we’d been mates, we really had very little in common anymore. It became clear that if a friendship with someone fizzles out, it likely does so for a reason.

Another reason to shun the site is that it often feels like an online popularity contest – I have something like 180 friends on there, but probably actually know less than half that number. And maintaining your site, updating it and keeping it current and interesting, takes time and effort that is better spent elsewhere, in real life. The one real use I have for Myspace these days is as a music resource: practically every artist under the sun must have a page on there, from bedroom producers of garbled electro-glitch and aspiring but hopelessly talentless singer-songwriters to international megastars and classical ensembles. If you want to hear new music, Myspace is an excellent place to do so.

And besides, Myspace is dwarfed in terms of popularity by Facebook, a social networking site so ubiquitous that you even hear the journalists on The Today Programme referring listeners to the programme’s profile. Shockingly, Facebook has more active users than there are people living in the UK. Some 64,000,000 people worldwide have profiles on the site. Fad or no fad, if that’s not a phenomenon, then I don’t know what is.

With that many users, there are bound to be plenty of unsavoury types misusing the service, and as such social networking sites have received a bad press over the last couple of years for the opportunities they present to identity thieves. Apparently large numbers of people make enough information about themselves freely available online to enable criminals to do things as ridiculous as setting up bank accounts, applying for credit cards and securing loans in users’ names. To be fair, you must be a bit of an idiot if you broadcast enough of your details to make this possible, but that doesn’t mean you deserve to be defrauded of large sums of money.

I’ve never encountered identity theft – what I have come across, and find equally troubling despite its obvious lesser potential for financial damage, is personality theft. Actually, not theft as such, but personality… research. It really is disturbing just how much you can find out about someone by reading their profiles on Myspace et al, by looking at their pictures, observing their taste in music, reading their blogs. It is a psychological profiling goldmine.

Now I’m not proud of this, and actually feel slightly guilty about it, but after learning the name of a girl that I thought was really nice, I thought I would have a cursory look on Myspace to see if she had a page. She did. And on Facebook. And Bebo.

Admitting that I did this makes me feel like some sort of online stalker. I don’t want to give the impression that I was spending time alone at night, devouring information on this girl in a sinister way, as it wasn’t like that. It was done with friends, out of innocent curiosity.

And I’m half-glad, half-regretful that I did. I learned, for a start, that this girl had, in my eyes, lamentable taste in music. And films. And television. I found out when her birthday was, where she went on her last holiday, whereabouts she lived, who her friends were, where she spent her free time, what her future plans were, and a whole lot more besides. Way too much really.

I felt like I'd done something wrong afterwards, as though I'd trespassed on someone's property. And, I’m sorry to say, I was judgmental enough to decide that I probably wouldn’t find this girl particularly interesting if I got to know her properly. Her tastes were very much in the mainstream – I learned nothing that leapt off the page, or screen, to set her apart, nothing that suggested what I consider to be an essential characteristic in a girl I want to be with, that she was a bit different. Perhaps I saved myself the disappointment of getting to know her properly and realising that I didn’t really like her anyway, or perhaps my preconceptions were misplaced, and she would in fact have turned out to be properly lovely. There’s more to a person than their tastes, after all.

The truth is though, after finding out all this, I felt like I really couldn’t talk to her anymore anyway. It wouldn’t feel right getting to know her – her telling me stuff about herself – when I already knew what she was telling me. I certainly wouldn’t have been prepared to own up and reveal to her the fact that by looking at her social network profiles I felt as though I knew her already. It would not have gone down well.

Now you might say that as this information is out there in the public domain, she has only herself to blame for me finding out so much about her. If she’s prepared to reveal as much of herself online, she has to accept that it is likely to be read, and be cool with the idea. But that’s not the point. I still feel like it was wrong.

Next time I’m getting to know a girl who I’d like to get into a relationship with, I am most definitely not going to look for her online. Finding out so much about a person through indirect means does you no favours. And what would this girl think of me if she read my profile? Maybe I will delete that Myspace account after all…

A Lesson in Life

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 11:12:00 GMT

I know blogs are meant to be interesting – commentaries on life, personal insights into situations or irreverent opinion pieces – but this particular entry is going to be very personal and likely of little interest to anyone. I’m writing it for me, as a cathartic exercise, and do not expect it to be “good reading” for anyone else.

Basically I’m absolutely gutted. There is a girl who works in a shop in Saffron Walden, a gorgeous girl, who is always smiling and comes across as one of the nicest people you could ever hope to meet. She has big, intelligent eyes, a kind and open face, and seems deeply positive, if that makes sense.

It’s rare that I meet a girl who I really feel attracted towards, but after going to this shop a few times I found myself wanting to get to know her, to find out if she was as lovely as she seemed.

After many, many visits to this shop and a lot of encouragement from my friends and colleagues, I plucked up the courage to ask her out. This was yesterday. She said yes, which was amazing. I was stunned and delighted. I arranged with her that I would go back in today to make plans, so I did. I just got back.

She told me she had bad news – that she’d spoken to her boyfriend (she did have a boyfriend, she said) and he wasn’t happy about her going for a coffee with me. She was nice about it, saying I was a nice guy, but to be honest after she revealed that she in fact would not be going for a coffee with me I kind of switched off and couldn’t concentrate on what she was saying. I said I understood and left.

Asking her out was very hard. I know it shouldn’t have been, it’s just asking a question after all, but it was. Being told by her that she couldn’t come for a coffee with me was harder though. I didn’t even have to do anything, just listen, but it was far more draining.

I don’t know what to do now – some of my friends say that because she has a boyfriend she’s off limits; others are saying that for her boyfriend to refuse to “let” her go for a coffee with another guy he must be a control freak and that I would be doing her a favour by trying to get her away from him.

I don’t know. I just feel utterly dejected. It’s no big deal, I keep telling myself, and in the scheme of things it’s not, but that doesn’t really help. It still hurts and I am still hugely gutted.

Oh well.

On a More Serious Note...

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 12:39:00 GMT

Is our insistence on “multiculturalism” going to be our downfall?

Are we sowing the seeds for a nationalist uprising borne out of increasing economic frustrations, a ballooning population and a desire to apportion blame?

Big questions that I obviously can’t answer, but that are definitely worth thinking about. I’m no expert on this subject, but even I can feel the tensions and antipathy that seem to be growing stronger by the day. Since 9/11 Islam has taken a real battering, almost all of which is unjustified. Radical Muslims are, we’re told, a huge threat, but I wonder how capable much of the country is at distinguishing between a normal, peace-loving follower of Allah and a jilted jihad-preaching extremist. And then there’s the question of our immigrant population.

A slightly sinister and slightly more drunk man I met in a Fulbourn pub this week spent considerable time telling me that this great country was not what it once was, and that Britain – specifically England – was losing its identity.

Interspersing his comments with that phrase that has become the hallmark of the xenophobe, “I’m not racist but…”, he went on for some time about how there were too many foreigners here, taking our jobs and exploiting the liberalities of our political system, making life hard for the rest of us.

I didn’t want to tell him that I thought his attitude was dangerous and that we shouldn’t hold anything against the people who come over here and invariably work harder than us, often in jobs that many of us are reluctant to do, as I worried how he would react. It’s not that he was threatening, but there was just enough of a glint of something in his eye, an unnerving vacancy, to make me wary of how I responded. That and the fact that the man he was with, while seeming quiet and harmless enough, I recognised as the “One-Armed Bandit”, the stuff of Fulbourn childhood legend who had earned his nickname through his criminal exploits and, obviously, being down on an arm.

I said that I didn’t feel that I was being exploited, and didn’t feel that I suffered as a result of the migrant population, but then I have a job and a home and don’t feel that my opportunities are limited because of the increasing number of foreigners setting up home in Britain. Perhaps he had suffered because of our immigration laws, making his views more understandable, but his opinion is not unusual and seems at odds with the supposedly more tolerant society in which we now live.

The man was 20 years older than me and truthfully whenever I’ve encountered these views in the past, they’ve not come from someone in my generation, but I wonder how many people my age do agree with this man’s views.

It’s impossible to predict where things are going in the future, but as more and more of our civil freedoms seem to be taken away from us, and the global and national economy head downhill, I worry that more and more people will take his stance.

Pies and Fire

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:28:00 GMT

Apologies to you, oh many thousands of readers, for this blog seems to have lost its momentum.

Seeing as it started as a record of my efforts to give up smoking, and I came clean about that last time I wrote, I’m not really sure which direction to take it in. However, for fear of disappointing the legions of subscribers who sign on to this page in their millions every day, I am obliged to write a new instalment.

To conclude the whole smoking saga – I smoke. I only feel marginally guilty about it. I do not suffer any major health complaints as a result, at least not yet. So that’s that.

Hmm. So what to write now? Perhaps I should have come up with a theme before beginning typing. I suppose I could resort to talking about that great British conversation default – the weather.

It’s cold today. Bitterly cold. And dark. There is something fundamentally wrong about getting up when it’s dark, going to work, and watching the day come and go from inside my office, before leaving work when it is, again, dark. It just doesn’t feel right.

Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy my job, but I find the fact that I spend all of the daylight hours at work quite disturbing.

However, darkness aside, there are benefits to the winter. Pies – there’s one. Eating a pie seems much more sensible in the winter, and there’s nothing like a good pie. A good quiche comes close, but I’ll take a hearty pie every time.

And fires. Fires are bloody great. In the winter they make so much more sense than in the summer. In fact anyone who lights a fire in a house in the summer is either ill, insane or an arsonist, so this is really the only time of year when you can legitimately enjoy one.

Finally, snow. The polar opposite of fire. Perhaps it’s just the novelty of having something fall from the sky that isn’t rain, but for whatever reason snow seems to have the ability to get everyone irrationally excited. The moment a single flake falls past one of the windows here, you can guarantee that some monitor junkie, desperate for any form of distraction, will shout “It’s snowing!” and the entire staff will dash to the windows, as if the Second Coming is happening right here, on the streets of Saffron Walden. Which would be good – that would definitely be our front page. It’s not of course, it’s just some frozen rain, but frozen rain that nevertheless holds some sort of magical appeal.

I suppose it could stem from childhood associations. When we were young, snow, when it ever-so-occasionally fell in significant quantities, represented the opportunity to go sledging, or to hurl lumps of the stuff at your friends and parents in gleeful we’re-only-playing-with-cold-white-stuff-but-hell-it’s-fun delight. School was off and the day was devoted to larking around in nature’s playground.

Snow on any day of the year is bizarrely enjoyable, but of course snow that fulfils the great Bing Crosby-derived cliché, the White Christmas, is the best snow there is. Will we have one this year? Bookies put the odds at 5/1…

Kicking the Habit - The Admission

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 11:57:00 GMT

First of all, let me congratulate you. By clicking on the links you have, you have put yourself among the elite few who read this blog.

And unfortunately I think the emphasis there should be on few – in the six weeks or so this blog has been online, it has been viewed a total of 14 times. I suspect around half of those are either by me or by people I know, so if you don’t fall into that category you can consider yourself even more special. Well done.

Anyway, as this blog began as a record of my efforts to give up smoking, I feel I ought to come clean: I haven’t given up.

No, I am still smoking. In fact I’m not even sure I’ve cut down. Okay, I haven’t.

I’m not even sure I ever really intended to. Giving up is tough, and surely practically impossible if you don’t actually want to quit.

I know I ought to, I don’t even especially enjoy smoking, but for some reason I still don’t really want to stop. I guess that’s what addiction is.

And besides, I’ve just returned from Majorca where I bought 10 50g pouches of Golden Virginia for just £30, so it looks like I’ll be carrying on for a while yet.

Buying tobacco in large quantities somehow makes smoking feel more disgusting. I’ve always felt slightly repulsed by the sight of people in supermarkets buying those massive 200-packs of Superkings or Embassy or whatever – it shows such commitment to the habit. But I guess the only difference for me is that I bought my baccy from a Spanish tobacconist, which is somehow more acceptable.

So there you have it, I am still smoking and I have no intention of maintaining the pretence that I’m giving up. Just don’t tell my mum.

Other people here in the Reporter office are having more success: one smoker has not had a cigarette since mid-August, while another has recently learned she’s pregnant and has therefore switched to patches. It means my cigarette breaks are lonely experiences, but hey, that’s what you get for smoking.

I will give up at some point, honest, but for now I will carry on killing myself slowly. I saw an article in The Sun on a 100-year-old woman who had been smoking for something like 80 years. And she wasn’t going to stop anytime soon. After all, nobody likes a quitter.

Kicking the Habit - The Means

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 13:10:00 GMT

The amount of information, help and advice on offer for anyone trying to give up smoking is staggering.

Type “help giving up smoking” into Google (as I just did) and practically two-million hits are returned, all there to assist you in your daunting mission to give up tobacco.

They include websites such as www.seriousquitters.co.uk, a free service from a pharmaceuticals company, and www.anti-smoking.org, which opens with the typically American slogan “Most important, know this – You Can Do It”.

However, the NHS offering for people trying to go smoke free, ingeniously entitled www.gosmokefree.co.uk, has to be the best.

This well-designed, clear and colourful site has everything the quitter could possibly need – information about support groups, access to a helpline and plenty of impressive figures about the advantages of kicking the habit.

It doesn’t take the same approach as those horrific scare-tactics adverts shown on the TV, which attempt to shock you into giving up, but rather encourages you to give up in a persuasive yet supportive way.

Being shown the carrot, rather than a big cancerous stick, certainly makes me feel more positive about quitting.

The site’s not full of images of emphysema-ridden tobacco die-hards, breathing their final breaths with the help of a machine, but instead shows photos of happy, smiling people, living their newly found smoke-free lives to the full and implicitly enjoying a quality of life that is simply out of reach for the smoker.

Never mind the fact that these blissfully content people are almost certainly models whose pearly white teeth have never been anywhere near a cigarette, the message is clear: giving up smoking is a milestone on The Path to Happiness.

Seriously though – however much stick the NHS takes, us would-be ex-smokers are lucky to have access to such a comprehensive service.

Head to your GP and you can pick up a substantial supply of patches for the price of a single prescription – far, far cheaper than buying them yourself from a pharmacy.

If that doesn’t work, one of the myriad other methods almost certainly will.

There’s group therapy, where you can share your experiences and receive encouragement from people in the same situation as you.

If looking other smokers in the eye sounds like too much stress, one-to-one advice is available and, failing that, if the thought of any form of face-to-face human contact whatsoever leaves you reaching for the smokes, you can even get help in the form of phone calls, emails and text messages!

Seriously, if you can’t find something on www.gosmokefree.co.uk that helps you quit, you are a lost cause.

Kicking the Habit - The Hard Part

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 13:45:00 GMT

I read a statistic that suggested that the probability of a smoker giving up using will power alone was just two per cent.

Although Disraeli’s famed quote on the validity of statistics almost certainly applies to this particular nugget, and it is exactly the sort of quote that is used in nicotine-substitute products’ advertising, hearing it was enough to make me think that perhaps I would need some help kicking the habit.

It’s not like I was on 40-a-day before I decided to quit – more like 10 – so my body should be able to handle the nicotine withdrawal, but the physical addiction to the drug isn’t what I’m worried about overcoming.

It’s breaking the habit that I think is going to be really difficult – conquering the deep-rooted associations that have formed over the years. Managing to go without smoking the kind of cigarettes that I smoke even when I don’t have a craving for one, that are smoked entirely out of habit.

The smokes which are going to be hardest to pack in are the one that accompanies a pint, the one had after dinner and the one enjoyed while driving (I have always thought the clichéd post-coital puff was overrated).

So rather than heading down to my local pharmacy to pick up some gum or patches, I thought the best thing that I could do was to break these associations – if I could eliminate these most enjoyable cigarettes, I would be well on my way to stopping altogether.

It’s tough though. When caught up in a traffic jam, it is hard to resist the urge to light up. Likewise when my friends smoke after eating, the desire to join them is almost overwhelming.

At least the State has made it harder to have a ciggy with a pint – although of course the act of reuniting the blissful pairing of beer and tobacco is only ever as far away as the door to the pub garden.

I worry that even when (when, not if) I do successfully quit, it’s still going to be extremely hard to stay off the smokes.

An ex-smoker relative of mine told me that, ever since she’d stopped 15 years ago, she had only ever been “one cigarette away from becoming a smoker again”.

Makes me wish I’d never started. And wonder whether I’ll be able to stop.

Kicking the Habit - The Reasons

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 13:43:00 GMT

So, 10 years after I first picked up a cigarette and, feeling decidedly naughty, sucked in its cancerous fumes, I have decided enough is enough.

I never want to be one of those hoarse and croaky people, with shaking hands and an unshakeable cough, with “smoker” written all over every line in their prematurely aged face.

I never want my children to see me smoking; I don’t want to kiss a girl and know that I taste of ashtrays; I don’t want to watch hundreds of pounds of hard-earned money go up in smoke year after year.

I don’t want to die young.

Good reasons to give up just keep on coming, while reasons to carry on smoking are harder to think of. In fact I can think of only one: because I enjoy it.

At least I think I do – but like so many things, the idea of having a cigarette is often more appealing than the reality.

I wonder why I even started smoking. What possessed me to do something to myself that I knew was harmful, and that all rationality suggested I should not do?

Most of the obvious reasons apply: it was an act of rebellion; a way of appearing older than I was; a way of separating myself from peers who appeared boring and aligning myself with those edgier, “cooler” types.

And a cigarette was quite a different thing to me back then to what it is now. When I was 14, cigarettes were exciting and fun. You had to find somewhere hidden away to furtively smoke one. There was a risk of being caught. Smoking, in itself, was an activity.

Nowadays smoking sometimes seems like more of a chore than a pleasure, and I certainly don’t impress anyone by lighting up anymore. Quite the opposite in fact.

I remember when I was seen by a family friend having a cigarette. I must have been 14 or 15.

“Don’t tell me you smoke, James?” she said to me, “I thought you were far too intelligent to smoke!”

But there is no correlation between smoking and intelligence. The decision to smoke is not one governed by the rules of logic. It is an irrational act.

If I can convince myself of the pure stupidity of continuing to smoke, of how it makes no sense at all, then I think I will stand a pretty good chance of giving up.

Mind over matter and all that!

Kicking the Habit - The Beginning

james.burton@archant.co.uk — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 13:40:00 GMT

The date July 1, 2007, will go down in the history books as a victory for public health and a defeat for the yellow-fingered, black-lunged smoker.

It was the day that smokers across the country became unable to light up while enjoying a pint inside their local, a frame of snooker at their club or a flutter at the bookie’s.

Apart from in Stoke-on-Trent that is, which was quickly dubbed “Smoke-on-Trent” after an administrative blunder by the city council meant officers were unable to issue fixed penalty fines to people breaching the ban until this Monday.

Nationally, the country seems to be split over the smoking ban. While many smokers are saying it’s an infringement of our civil liberties, the “nanny state” telling us how to live our lives, most non-smokers among us believe it will make pubs and clubs far more pleasant places to spend time and that the ban will have positive effects on the health of the millions affected by the perils of “second-hand” smoke.

As a smoker – wannabe-ex-smoker, even – you would perhaps expect me to side with the former camp, but the truth is that I think the ban is a good idea.

So what if we can’t have a cigarette in the pub? We can still have one outside, and those people who don’t want to inhale our fumes no longer have to.

For me, and doubtless countless others, July 1 was the day I said I’d give up. Even many months before, I would say “I can smoke now, but come July 1, I’m giving up”.

Funny that – anyone serious about giving up would not specify some distant future date, but declare themselves off the wicked weed straight away. After all, if you wanted to give up, you’d want to give up straight away, right?

So July 1 came around and I found myself half-heartedly not allowing myself a cigarette on my drive to work. Or after lunch. But the sneaky cigarette at 11am, with a cup of tea, was okay.

I mean, you can’t expect to just give up straight away, can you? It’s all about cutting down, then stopping altogether. And so I found myself continuing to smoke, even though my self-imposed cut-off date had passed.

But I will stop. Ten years is long enough to be smoking. And I value my life more now than I did when I started a decade ago.

It’s just going to be harder than I thought…