Feeling blue
This week, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I’ve written about Twitter. Also, my favourite columnists, a map of the looming housing crisis and a nice story about a highland railway.
The US midterms are objectively the most important thing to have happened in the world this week, I fear: so far as I can tell, a decent results summary, at time of writing, would be “less scary than expected, but will probably still stop Biden doing anything for the next two years”. That said, I’ve not kept up at all – in presidential years, I’m as capable of boring on about how it’ll all come down to Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest as the next guy, but midterms just never grab me the same way – so let’s talk about what’s really been bothering me instead. You can probably guess what it is.
I joined Twitter some time in 2009. My first tweet was, “I am not on Twitter, so please don’t follow me”. I’m not sure why. Perhaps I’d created the account purely as a placeholder, as if there were any other Jonn Elledges that might get there first, or as if I was in any way worth impersonating; probably I was bored at work. But I genuinely didn’t expect it to be any more of a thing that my extremely brief residence on MySpace had been (140 characters? What could you even do with that?). I’d lived through chat rooms and usenet and mailing lists and MSN and ICQ; I’d found friends and occasionally, in an era when this was still taboo, as if everyone on the internet was an axe murderer pretending to be someone else, partners on all of them. If pushed I would probably have guessed Twitter wouldn’t be any different: a thing that might be fun, might be annoying, but wouldn’t be important and would almost certainly pass.
But it has been different. At a time when I was toiling away in the copy mines of the trade press, it enabled me to meet editors with commissioning power on mainstream titles: that led me to the New Statesman and CityMetric, which led me to here. It enabled me to find an audience for the silly, nerdy stuff I actually wanted to write, to expand my social circle and meet people I admire. I’m not exaggerating when I say that, the day I realised that Hugh Laurie followed me, and thus clearly knew who I was, I emitted a little squeak. Or that a significant number of my friends today came from Twitter. Or that, without it, I would have neither my partner nor my dog.
We all make jokes about Twitter being a hellsite, because even before Elon Musk arrived with his sink it was a time suck, stuffed to the gills with Nazis. But it has, nonetheless, made just about every thread of my life better.
I realise this is unusual – my life there has been charmed, by virtue of being a cis white guy. But it means I’ve always laughed off the idea of a mass exodus – too many of us have got used to the town square thing, the idea there’s a place where politicians and celebrities and academics and journalists and wonks can all hang out and debate the news and call each other names. I’ve always assumed that it’d probably trundle on until something better came along, and that Mastodon – I’ve created an account, but nonetheless – is not it.
This is clearly motivated reasoning – I’m not sure my career, so much of which is now based on noisily selling myself, works without it – but still, Elon Musk just paid $44 billion for this thing. Surely he’s not actually going to let it go down the tubes?
The last few days, though, have really shaken this confidence. Follow counts have shown a gentle but clear decline; Twitter’s ad revenues a rather less gentle one. Worse is the highly visible sacking of vast numbers of staff, with no obvious plan behind it. Musk clearly doesn’t want to waste his investment, and neither do the banks or Tesla shareholders who are backing it. But there’s an overwhelming sense that nobody knows what they’re doing: this piece by Chris Stokel-Walker in the MIT Technology Review makes an unnervingly good case that the company has fired so many engineers its product might simply start to break. Even if it doesn’t, the value of Twitter – to users, but also, to the extent it has any, to advertisers – comes from its critical mass, a sense that you should be here because everyone else is. That is a very fragile basis for a business.
Which might raise questions about whether it was a stupid idea to spend $44bn on it.
Anyway, I will be there, I imagine, until the bitter end, because it’s been good to me and because I need it to work and also, quite simply, because I love it. And I am still hoping that this isn’t the end after all. We shall see.
If – could happen – you want something else to read about Twitter, here are two excellent other things: James Ball on its problems, and Rachel Cunliffe on its virtues. And now onto other things.
I am here
One reason the top of the newsletter isn’t about politics this week is because I am on a family visit to the Scottish Highlands, and it’s hard to feel any of it matters from up here. If you’re not on Twitter or Instagram then…
a) how on earth did you find out about this newsletter (seriously, please tell me, I need to work out how to do marketing in a possible post-Twitter world), and
b) you may have missed this important video of my en suite combined toilet/shower on the sleeper train up.
Something my father-in-law pointed out to me on a Sunday afternoon walk: the station in the village of Braemar, which has never seen a single train. The Deeside Railway opened, from Aberdeen along the Dee valley to Banchory, in 1853, reached Aboyne in 1859, and Ballater in 1866. It was then meant to continue another 17 miles into the hills to Braemar, the last village you hit before the emptiness of the Cairngorms. The only problem is, the Balmoral Estate – then home to one Victoria Saxe-Coburg-Gotha – was in the way, and its owner didn’t want trains rushing through her lovely country retreat.
So unfinished it remained. But they’d already built the station. So instead of trains, the last stretch of service was provided instead by “traction engine” – a sort of road-based steam locomotive, pulling carriages along roads.
None of this matters any more – the entire line closed in 1967, a victim of the Beeching axe. The stations have found other uses. Today, to get to what proudly terms itself “Royal Deeside”, you need to travel from Aberdeen by road.
This is in some ways a pity, because it’s lovely.
Anyway, the day I was in Braemar, the Observer published this piece on the place by Eve Livingstone: “Britain’s coldest village prepares for freezing weather”.
Meanwhile, elsewhere
1. The British public, as ever, are wrong about basically everything. The thing they are particularly wrong about at present is Rishi Sunak – some YouGov polling in the Times.
2. No, London’s growing cycle infrastructure hasn’t, despite what some anti-cycling campaigners have claimed, “Swung a wrecking ball at bus journey times”. Nice demolition from Max Sullivan, Labour councillor in Westminster, here.
3. Conservators at the Museum of London have been working on a 1920s map, which overlays the tube onto a 1746 map of London. Joe Farrington-Douglas tweeted, “Didn’t realise @JonnElledge had been making niche transport maps since the 1920s, glad to hear it’s been restored”, and he’s right, it’s exactly the sort of thing I’d do, so here it is.
4. Just a lovely piece of writing by a friend, which it took me too long to read: Frankie Goodway, on death in London. (Hmm, the week I’m out of London and all the links are about it. What’s with that?)
5. And finally, a baby giraffe attempts to walk.
The Newsletter of (Not Quite) Everything guide to Jonn’s favourite columnists
1. Admiral Horatio Nelson
Height: 51.6m
Location: London
Erected: 1843
Purpose of column: To commemorate Britain’s victory over the French and Spanish navies in the Battle of Trafalgar, 1805, as part of the Napoleonic Wars. Nelson died during the battle, after being shot through the lung with a musket ball, though was said to have stopped to offer advice to a midshipman while being carried to his death bed. Incidentally, if you’ve ever wondered who Hardy, of “Kiss me-” fame was: he was the captain of the HMS Victory, the flagship on which Nelson died.
2. Caesar Nerva Traianus, better known as the emperor Trajan (98-117AD)
Height: 30m
Location: Rome
Erected: c107-113AD
Purpose of column: To commemorate the empire’s victory, under Trajan’s leadership, in the Dacian wars. The Dacians, who inhabited an area now in Romania and Moldova, were said to be menacing the provinces of the Lower Danube; but we only have the Romans’ word for that, because much of what we know about the Dacians comes from the victors’ sources, not least the spiral bas relief which runs round the column and depicts the war against them. The 123-day celebration of Roman victory was the longest in the empire’s history.
3. Simeon Stylites, or Symeon the Stylite
Height: Various – he used a number of pillars in his time; the tallest is thought to have been around 15m
Location: Aleppo
Erected: Some time around 420
Purpose of column: Look, sometimes a guy’s just trying to practice hardcore physical austerity (staying in a hut for a year and a half, going the whole of Lent without eating or drinking, standing upright as long as your legs will allow it), but so many people keep bugging him that the only option left is to erect a pillar and live the rest of his natural life on the top of it, dedicating the last 35 to 42 years (accounts vary) to sitting on top of it, contemplating God.
...okay I’m going to offer a quick glimpse behind the curtain here. When I came up with this dumb joke, those three were all the columnists I had. “But,” I thought, “there must be loads of people with their own columns!”
There are. But they do rather fit into one of the themes we’ve already identified. Look:
4. General Rowland Hill, 1st Viscount Hill
Height: 40.7m
Location: Shrewsbury
Erected: 1816
Purpose of column: To commemorate Hill’s various victories while leading assorted armies through different bits of the (hmm, this feels familiar) Napoleonic Wars. So popular was Hill with his men that he was known as (I’m sorry, I’m so sorry) “Daddy Hill”.
5. Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington
Height: 40.2m
Location: Liverpool
Erected: 1865
Purpose of column: Commemorates the successful general turned mediocre prime minister’s achievements, which, given they were so much greater on the battlefield than in Westminster, we must assume to mean the victories he oversaw in the (stop me if you’ve heard this before) Napoleonic Wars.
Talking of which:
6. Napoleon Bonaparte
Height: 53m (so, higher than Nelson’s; no reason)
Location: Wilmille, a village just outside Boulogne-sur-Mer and just across the Channel from Folkestone
Erected: 1804
Purpose of column: This one’s good: it’s to commemorate the French Empire’s successful invasion of England. This, combined with the fact the column pre-dates the Battle of Trafalgar, may offer some insight into the danger of erecting your victory column before you have secured your victory. In the event, although construction began in 1804, it was left unfinished for decades, but completed, statue and all, in 1853, on the orders of the emperor’s nephew, Napoleon III. It’s technically called the Column of the Grande Armée, in what one can only assume is an attempt to save face.
7. Christopher Columbus
Height: 60m
Location: Barcelona
Erected: 1888 (blimey lads, that took a while, he’d been dead 382 years, I hope you move a little bit quicker when it comes to my column)
Purpose of column: The reason it took so long was because it was built for the Exposició Universal de Barcelona, a sort of world fair thingy. The monument marks the point at which Columbus returned to Europe after his first voyage to the Americas – an event that was, to be fair, world-changing, especially for the inhabitants of those continents. It’s often said the statue is pointing to the new world. It isn’t, it’s pointing south-southeast, towards Algeria – which, since Columbus thought he was looking for India, is a bit on the nose.
8: Almost every bloody Roman Emperor that followed Trajan
Height: Various
Location: All over the bloody place
Erected: Oh god don’t
Purpose of column: To commemorate the fact that Antoninus Pius/Marcus Aurelius/Constantine/Theodosius/Justinian/whoever were pretty great guys, y’know? Honestly, it does feel a bit like they just wanted one because the other guys had one.
The only story in this lot that actually seems interesting enough to bother writing down concerns “Pompey’s Pillar”, erected in Alexandria, Egypt, between 298-302. This is odd because, by that point, Pompey had been dead for 300 years, and it was the Egyptians who killed him. What’s going on here is that someone boobed, and the column actually commemorates the emperor Diocletian, who was in power at the time it was built.
It’s quite funny imagining how annoyed both Pompey and Diocletian would be about that turn of events.
Anyway that’s quite enough of that.
Map of the week
This week, we’re looking at which bits of Britain would be hit hardest by the current financial turbulence. The housing analyst Neal Hudson has been mapping data on which areas have unusually high numbers of mortgages with high loan to value (that is, more than 4x income), a measure of how likely local homeowners are to struggle as interest rates rise. Because of the way housing data is collected, it’s done by postcode area:
Unsurprisingly, it’s the south, and especially the London area, where mortgages are most out of sync with incomes. Interestingly, though, inner London looks relatively sane – it’s the ring of suburban areas (Watford, Enfield, Romford, Sutton) where the number of risky mortgages are their highest. This is momentarily counterintuitive, but actually makes sense if you think about it. In central London, house prices are so silly that you can’t buy property simply by overstretching a bit, you have to have a slug of cash from somewhere. It’s outer London where people are simply taking on bigger mortgages.
Hudson’s commentary suggests who might be at risk too:
…higher LTI borrowers (4.5+) were more likely to be home movers than first time buyers, with an average age of 34.
That to me sounds like a lot of people who’ve stretched themselves to trade up to family homes. All of which suggests to me that reports of the blue wall’s demise may not have been exaggerated.
Elsewhere in the country – some of the darker islands in lighter seas include the Harrogate and Edinburgh postcodes, the most expensive housing markets in the north and Scotland respectively. You can read the rest of Hudson’s commentary, and explore the full map, here.
Endnotes
Hey, it’s the 33rd anniversary of the Berlin Wall coming down! No idea what to do with that information, just thought I’d mention.
Meanwhile, in things I have written for the NS:
1. It’s the most wonderful time of the year! But is it just me, or is some of the magic going out of poppy season?
2. “Since 1918, there has been no formal property qualification involved in British politics. There has, however, been an informal one, which guides decisions about whose votes are thought worth chasing.” On the fact no one in British politics seems to think that renters count as people.
And finally, one from the archives, which the new team at the website formerly known as CityMetric decided to re-promote: where did England’s counties get their names? (They’ve cut my self-indulgent drop intro, but that’s fine, that’s totally fine.)