TWICE yesterday I answered my mobile phone, daydreaming that it might be something important - one of the big political parties wanting last-minute advice for their election campaign, that sort of thing - only to find myself talking to a cold-caller.
My office email inbox is full of messages it's reasonably safe to ignore, notably the ones from the editor marked 'URGENT!'
My Twitter feed receives new tweets at the rate of knots: people bickering with each other about politics, mostly. More tweets from the pestilential Kate Hopkins. I thought I'd unfollowed her - how did she manage to get round that? Does she have unearthly powers we don't yet know about?
All of this is a roundabout way of saying I wish I had a little of Paul Merton's approach to such things. He doesn't do Twitter, for a start, which makes him a rarity, given the number of top-flight comedians for whom it's an unbeatable way of communicating with their fans. Jimmy Carr, for example, has written more than 3,000 tweets to his near five million followers. Sarah Millican has made 67,000 tweets or re-tweets (67,000?!) and has 1.47 million followers.
In a phone interview with Paul about his improv show at the King's, Glasgow, on May 18, he said: "I'm not on Twitter, no, I don't have email and I don't have a mobile phone."
I can't help blurting out my surprise. "I know," he laughs. "It's like I'm a man from the past. I'm the same as everybody else was, I suppose, about 20 years ago."
His wife, Suki, has email; Paul 'dips into email when people insist', as when he was dealing with the publishers of his autobiography, Only When I Laugh.
A lot of comedians, he added, "are told by their agents, 'you've got to be on Twitter, you've got to be on social media', but if everybody's doing it, have you really got a presence? I suppose you have. I don't know. But isn't it all cancelling each other out?"
He wrote his autobiography not just in long hand, but in pencil, too. "Can you imagine," he said in another interview, "handwriting stuff and the editors having to decipher it? The effort of that was fairly immense." As for having no email or phone, he said, "I suspect if everybody could get away with it, they would [do the same]."
Me, too, I think, with a sudden, wistful glance at my phone, and at an email inbox and Twitter feed that never seem to sleep.
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