I originally started this post just over a month ago, on 1st February, and then laid it to one side. It was originally intended as a shortish thing, advising that I’d be spending much less time on Facebook and doing more things in the real world instead. At least, I think that was Plan A. 1st February seems like so long ago now.

Several things got in the way of finishing what should have been a straightforward bit of writing: for one thing, more work than usual, of the kind that pays real money; rehearsals  with the band; some minor ailments I won’t trouble you with that ganged up on me for a few days; and February Album Writing Month (FAWM), of which more later.

Whilst all that was going on, however, the code that produced the idea for the original post was still running in my subconscious, and had developed into what I hope is about to spool out as a semi-coherent plan for living that you might identify with. But let’s start with Facebook.

I first joined Facebook in something like 2008 or 9. A lot of my friends were on it already. Some of my more IT-literate friends refused to go on it, for the usual reasons that IT-literate people don’t go on these kind of popular things. It all seemed pretty innocuous back then. FB asked you lots of questions about what you liked, and you answered them more or less honestly. You saw posts from friends and colleagues, and traded friend requests and banter with them. I created pages for my various literary and musical personas and invited people to lots of real life events. Some of them even turned up.

After an initial burst of fascination, I dialled back the FB activity. In time I was to try out some other social media: Instagram, BlueSky, and Twitter. I don’t know if WhatsApp counts as social media, but I also signed up to it when it became obvious that it might be useful.

Of all of these, the only ones I now have an active involvement with are WhatsApp and Facebook. The others, frankly, became annoying: Instagram seemed incredibly narcissistic to me; Twitter – well was Twitter, but I found the supposedly more ‘ethical’ Bluesky was prone to be just as much of an echo chamber, and just as full of people ranting.

WhatsApp I’ll come back to, but FB’s behaviour became increasingly troubling. Its algorithm became more and more adept at thinking it knew what I liked and targeting advertising at me. I lost contact with what my friends were doing because I had to wade through increasing amounts of targeted material, some of it clearly a scam and/or generated by AI. Every evening, just before I went to bed, instead of reading a book as I wanted to, I found myself scrolling through more and more stuff on FB just to catch up on what my friends, most of whom I’ve met in real life and am fairly sure are human, were doing out in that real world.

In other words, even a black-hearted enterprise like Facebook had become more cynical and monetized than before – and the more time I spent on it, the more it was trying to exploit me and my data for someone else’s gain.

At the same time, although some of last year’s real life was challenging, there were moments when it was brought home to me that time in front of a screen was much less real than, well, time not in front of a screen. I know that’s old news, but our trip to South East Asia really underlined that being in the moment, experiencing in the flesh experiences that had never before flashed in front of our eyes, was absolutely what life was all about. I took some photos there that I’m illustrating this post with, but it reached the stage that I didn’t even want to waste time staring at the world through my phone camera any more.

My original plan as we travelled through Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam, was to post on FB at the end of the stay in each country. In the event, after Thailand, I didn’t even switch the laptop on. There was too much real world in the way.

As I mentioned earlier, I set off to write this post some weeks ago, but abandoned it in the wake of time pressures and doing stuff more interesting than that original message. So what’s changed? What on earth, exactly, am I talking about?

Let’s start with this. Here’s a list, in no particular order, of the experiences in the past year or so that have meant most to me:

• Daughter and Heiress’s wedding, 23/02/25. Other people took almost all of the photos. Fairly obviously, up there in the top three experiences of my life, the others

  

  being the birth of said D & H and my and her mother’s wedding.

• A trip to Yorkshire in Spring, staying in Northallerton, and in particular dinner at our fave English pub, the Wellington Heifer.
• Throughout the year, writing songs and recording them at my mate Graham’s. Songwriting supplies so many dopamine hits – scribbling down a line that might make itself into something, even just a well-turned phrase; the burst of melody that won’t go away until you get it down on the phone; both these things coming together as a song (usually cradling a guitar, sometimes a keyboard) and, finally, recording vocals and acoustic instruments at G’s. Long hours spent refining things into a final track may take place in front of a screen, but that’s a necessary evil.
• Meeting pals for a drink or a meal – my foresaid recording engineer and our mutual friend Mark for a curry at some point last summer, to give just one example; a more recent dinner at an eye-wateringly expensive steakhouse with other pals more recently, as another. More simple lunches or coffees with others, shooting the shit or talking shite as appropriate.
• Not such a happy occasion but definitely meaningful, visiting an ailing friend at the

  

  end of January.

• Going to a bookbinding afternoon quite recently, meeting new people, and producing a wee Harris Tweed book.
• Playing golf badly with my pal Jim.
• Designing and constructing a cigar box guitar with foresaid pal Jim, and presenting it to my son-in-law Scott as his 30th birthday present.
• Christmas Day with all the family here, at home.
• Seeing Lucinda Williams live.
• A weekend in Dunkeld with Alison’s brother and his wife.
• The trip to South East Asia. Challenging, physically and emotionally at times, but an incredibly eye-opening experience to view the world from the point of view of the Thais, the Vietnamese and, perhaps especially, the Cambodians. And all experienced with a group of lovely fellow travellers we’ll probably never see again, but who were, all of them, a pleasure to spend time with.
• Playing gigs with my pals into what has evolved into a new band called Anchor Line Revue. This was my friend Jon Horne’s original plan. I didn’t think it would work, but am very happy to have been proven wrong.

I could go on but I won’t. You get the idea. But what’s my big idea? Basically it boils down to this.

There’s no escaping screens these days, unless you want to go off-grid somewhere in the Amazon basin, paint yourself with vegetable dye, and break out the ayahuasca. That’s a bit too hardcore for me. I like living in Edinburgh and staying in touch with friends and contacts all over the world without, necessarily, taking a long haul flight to go for a coffee with them. At the same time, I want to maximize my real time interactions and minimize my screen time. Some thoughts on how I’ll do this:

• Dial back even further on Facebook. I now have Messenger on my phone, which means I don’t have to log onto FB itself to contact the 300+ people I have there as friends (a list that’s overdue a prune). I’ll still want to see how people are doing, but I’m more likely now to do that by messaging them and asking them. Similarly, I’ll still want to promote gigs and albums, but I’ll look into how else to do that.
• Make more time for coffee. This will involve winding up my consultancy in June and retiring fully, an event which I’ll post about separately. I want to create more space to

  

  socialise.

• Explore those corners of the internet that have somehow, miraculously, avoided being monetized. One such example is the FAWM website which appears, like Brigadoon, fully operational every February, and a whole community of songwriters foregather on it. You contribute what you want towards its upkeep but that’s the only money changing hands. Then you start posting songs and getting comments on them. After a listening phase to catch up on everyone else’s songs, it disappears beneath the waves on 15th March. No one steals your data. I find all this incredibly pleasing.
• Create more Whatsapp chat groups. I’m not a fan of the mobile phone – I just hate how everything now is being funneled towards it – but this seems a more innocuous way of staying in touch with groups of people.
• Use this blog more as a means of communication. My posts are always going to be sporadic, and yes, I know WordPress shoves adverts in the middle of people’s blogs,

  

  but it feels, well, just a bit less all-knowing than the social media companies?

• Read more books. They’re a great source of information, and the fear of being sued keeps factual authors and publishers closer to the straight and narrow than some random tweeting a conspiracy theory.
• and … err… that’s about it really. Do more real life stuff in real time and bother less about capturing it for posterity. Our analogue memories of things may be unreliable, but then so is the internet these days, what with AI and all that reality altering nonsense.

You get the drift. I’ll try to stay abreast of tech developments, but frankly, mostly so I know how to stay the hell out of the way of them. Any suggestions or comments welcome, and see you (I hope) in the real world, even if it’s an underground bunker as part of the Resistance, soon!

P.S. I may post more about my time recording in a church this February, but here’s a taster of what the demos sounded like: https://soundcloud.com/tribute-to-venus/round-about-now