Since opening a Twitter account in March I’ve sent over 5000 thoughts into the micro blogging vortex. Micro blogging is obviously easier than traditional blogging, because each post is a work in its own right, and they don’t take long to do. Grow a tiny thought, snap it off, drop it into the furnace and watch its ore render down into the hot, liquid hive mind. All the while, things are happening in the real world and people are doing things in the real world. Or are they? At first, I found Twitter liberating. It gave me a sense of structure that I’ve always found difficult to create in my everyday life. Accomplish a task, say that you’ve accomplished it and then move on to the next task. A kind of accountability. Before long, though, the tasks are taking longer because you’re stopping to check your Twitter responses and send out the thoughts that you were planning while you assembled the first two pages of your Ikea wardrobe. So then your Ikea wardrobe takes the whole day. (Exaggeration for effect.) I’ve also found myself redrafting tweets in my head, in that soulless void between the blank DVDs and the kitchen utensils in Asda. Which means that putting the shopping away is pretty much an obstacle in the way of committing that tweet to the ether. The cycle unwinds. Your life unravels.

But that’s only if you accept the somewhat Luddite and reactionary distinction between electronic media and real life. It used to be commonplace to accuse people who read for a large portion of their lives of not living in the real world; but literacy will be saved from widespread stigma because of its symbiotic relationship with knowledge and education. Literacy is a requirement for using the internet, and the internet has created new forms of literacy and many new forms of interaction based on those new forms of literacy. Yet people will continue to assert that the internet is not real life. Friends that you have on Facebook are not real friends. People who follow each other on Twitter are not real friends. You converse with them, debate with them, make a conscious decision to read their thoughts, share jokes with them, watch their interplay with each other, look at their family photographs. Still, some would not have it that they are real friends unless you regularly talk to them on the phone or spend time in their physical company.

Anyone who has immersed themselves in Twitter has experienced at least one crisis of Twitter Faith. I’m using capitals there to annoy people who see Twitter as a total waste of time. Many can’t even say “Twitter” or “tweet” without at least a frisson of amusement in their voice – most notably the phone girl on The Wright Stuff. (It is always a girl: I’m not gender stereotyping.) Anyway, Tristram Shandy be damned. I was talking about Twitter Faith. There are times when you think “Wait a minute. This is madness. I’m not accomplishing anything, and I’m running out of things to say.” My latest episode was last weekend. It was prompted to a large extent by the esteemed horror and thriller novelist Sarah Pinborough and the accomplished writer and director Julian Simpson deleting their Twitter accounts almost simultaneously. I was alerted to it by one of Sarah’s updates on Facebook. As writers, I think they’ll both understand and won’t mind me saying that their Twitter presence was in each case based on a constructed persona. I do it too. I decided early on that the medium was meaningless unless I’d adopted a position before the 140 characters were up. That position then has to be compressed and consequently sometimes distorted. These distortions give it an edge – an edge made sharper and more dangerous by the speed of the updates, more so as you follow more people. But the challenge lies in controlling tone and ambiguity so that misunderstandings can be corrected quickly. Doesn’t always work. Hence some people unfollow – an act I confess I have trouble not taking personally. But that’s just me. Julian and Sarah went with the flow, did it effortlessly, did with frequent use of taboo language which as a practising teacher I’m simply unable to match online, did it without giving a flying fill-in-the-missing-word about who unfollowed them. They were entertaining and engaging, notable highlights being Julian’s recent “holiday” and some exchanges I had with Sarah about the most recent episodes of Torchwood.

Twitter is different things to different people. (Yes, I know, but I’ve learned that avoiding all clichés is a mistake.) To some it’s just unwinding over a glass of wine and sharing views on X-Factor contestants. For me, the bottom line is that I have real friends online, who I have never met. I’m aware of all the safety issues, but it is now possible to meet people and become friends with them without ever sharing their physical presence. That may happen. It may not. But it is not a prerequisite for friendship anymore. So, I was sad to lose Sarah and Julian as friends on Twitter, but I’ll be staying in touch with them through the other available channels. The thing that hit me hard on Saturday was that they are both writers. I aspire to write more, to be a better writer, to have the discipline of self-denial that it takes to be successful. I therefore admired their decision and wondered if I should follow them. Quixotically, I hope to develop my writing while maintaining my Twitter habit and new found Facebook habit. I like to think that in specific ways social networking has honed my writing. Facebook is nicer and more chilled. I’m tending to hang there when I need some headspace.

So, for Julian and Sarah, it’s “Time Enough At Last”. Just don’t break your spectacles. As for their tweets – “tears in rain”.

First dark morning of BST. Leeds Fest tickets on sale tonight. Not sure what’ll happen with that. Don’t have time to queue at HMV. Don’t really hold out much hope of getting any tickets online. It’s really irritating that they don’t announce the headliners until minutes before the tickets go on sale. It’s not as if they’ll have any trouble selling the tickets. Seems almost as though they want the process to be chaotic.

The bonfire and fireworks went down well as a little surprise. All familiar. Sitting on the step with a beer and watching the fire while Matthew Wright intoned from inside. Small scale and subtle fireworks compared with the whizz-bang competition going on between neighbouring streets and houses in the murky sky. I thought of it too as kind of celebration of Barak’s win – and the hope it represents.

Saturday was Lisa’s promised shopping trip as part of her 16th birthday present, with a small coterie of her friends. I’d undertaken to do a bit of remote control chaperoning. Keen late September sunshine. I really should be back at school. Unbroken blue sky. Wyclef Jean and his comment on UK weather.

The approach to Victoria station is so different now. It used to be a patch of waste ground (at one point a makeshift car park) and then Chetham’s School Of Music. Now it’s grass and plate glass and water features and Starbuck’s and teenagers killing time. Chetham’s of course remains resolute and impartial.

Manchester is a harder City than Leeds. Now I know why my mates liked Leeds so much in the late 70s and early 80s. Friendlier and easier on the nerves. I’ve been in West Yorkshire for over twenty years now and I still find it strange that people say thank you to bus drivers. Thank you for what? Being miserable and complaining if you don’t have the right change. Those are my memories of Manchester bus drivers. Manchester is perhaps more honest. I remembered the feeling. I remembered the anonymity.

Gave Lisa a brief indication of the layout in the vicinity of the Arndale Centre and Market Street, and suggested that she might stray as far as Piccadilly if she was feeling adventurous. Said that she should be careful of the traffic. Had forgotten that Piccadilly gardens is now grass and young people and sedate trams. No more Victorian ornamentation; no tramps – just clean cut Big Issue sellers telling you to have good weekend. Later took a few photos of the Victoriana in Albert Square, and was devastated to find that my phone wouldn’t send MMS anymore. That stuff has the potential to blight a weekend, and in a sense it did. I’m better at perspective now though. Managed to pull myself around to something like equilibrium, eventually.

After they had opted for Pizza Hut, I ducked down to Shambles Square to check those two very old pubs that were moved brick by brick – or something. They don’t even ask you if you’re staying in anymore. All the vessels are just plastic. The whole of the outside is blighted by smokers. They need to stop. If I drink I don’t spray out a fine mist of 1664 that forces other people to drink. But they force me to smoke, Zippo or no Zippo.

Bean wrap and baked crisps from Boots – cheaper and less frustrating than pub food. Ate in a bus shelter opposite the Royal Exchange. Even then people decided to smoke at me. On to Albert Square where the MMS hiccup first emerged. Old Nag’s Head. Empty. The UK pub trade is dying. Saturday lunch. City centre. It should be ramming. Piccadilly gardens and the conversation with Judith. Seedy bar on the corner of Portland Street Bus Station. Empty and threatening. That little pub has gone. That bus station has seen so many painful partings. There is some circularity in this narrative. Joyce would be proud. Or not. Wrestling with TomTom and Streetmap to try and find Affleck’s Palace. Done, but worries about declining battery. Could have just asked someone, but that would be too easy. It’s a male thing.

Back over to Moseley Street and a quick look at the art gallery. Really wanted to see the Astarte Syriaca again, but it wasn’t there. I guess she’s resting in the basement somewhere, reminiscing, or maybe undergoing some restoration. I seem to remember being told that some of the Pre-Raphaelite stuff spends time down in Birmingham. Distinct memory of my friend Dave falling to his knees in front of that painting one Saturday afternoon. Admittedly he’d had a few. The new bit wasn’t there then – a rhapsody of plate glass glued on to the Victorian Stone. Spotted an interesting image on the bridge between the two.

Another empty sanded floorboard venue. The last of the sun in a backstreet. Some discussion outside a closing salon. Lock, cursory check; move on. Besieged by more smoke.

Wandered over towards Affleck’s Palace again, so as to be near if and when they decided to throw in the shopping towel. There doesn’t appear to be a joke shop on Tib Street anymore. Do joke shops in that sense even exist now? That whole area is quite depressed. Avoided The City because the smoking guard at the door looked like they were expecting some elusive sign of affiliation before you’d be allowed in. Opted for The Millstone instead. Old fashioned. From pensioners to the relatively young but opinionated. Football talk. Plastic fire enshrined three feet above ground in a fake fireplace. Plywood cutting off the chimney flue – if indeed there is one. Very thin old woman with dyed ginger hair in a turquoise suit and a white blouse. Traditional pubs that survive and thrive appear to be pockets of sub-culture. The others have bled their custom away to supermarket beer, sofas, central heating and Sky Plus.

Some miscalculation of train times after Starbucks and before the Printworks – which is really a very large, dingy, draughty shed. Trying to work out which bits were original and which were plywood. No phone credit between four people on the train home.