SOCIAL media has featured strongly on social media this week, with much debate about bullying and how to become expert in it.

Like any top expert, I should begin this lecture by defining my terms. Thus, as I understand it, social media is so called because, as the term implies, it facilitates the interactions that hold our society together: blackmailing people, organising gang fights, shaming former partners, setting up drug deals, and mocking the afflicted.

Personally, whenever I feel the urge to mock the afflicted, at least I have the decency to do it to their face, sometimes adding a poke in the stomach for good measure.

I guess that makes me anti-social media. At someone else’s behest, I was on LinkedIn (some kind of social site aimed at professionals”) but came off it last month, having concluded that I was far too busy for that sort of thing. And that’s been it. Say “troll” to me, and my mind jumps immediately to that scene in The Hobbit where three of the blighters are turned to stone.

Online trolls don’t cook dwarves, as in Tolkien, but they do give folk a roasting. Even the Royal Family, hitherto loved by all other than a few malcontents, have found themselves targeted.

This week, responding to trolls bullying Britain’s first anarcho-syndicalist duchess, Meghan Markle, the Firm published social media guidelines threatening posters of abusive messages with a visit from Plod, who is already up to his oxters in monitoring “thought crimes”.

Much of the abuse is said to come from supporters of rival duchess, Kate Middleton. Meghan is not just a socialist but an American, which top snobs online see as gauche and brash, as exemplified by the country’s popular president, Derek Trump, who went viral, as they say, after he got someone’s name wrong, giving Apple chief executive Tim Cook the pip when he referred to him as “Tim Apple”.

Twitter users took the opportunity to bully the world’s most powerful man by referring to him in turn as President Orange, a racial insult based on the colour of the influential dullard’s skin.

While you might expect the Royal Family to sympathise with a fellow aristocrat like Mr Trump, in fact the increasingly left-wing Firm left him to stew. Instead, Prince Harry, husband of the aforementioned Markle, addressed a gathering of young persons in London, telling them social media was bad for their health.

He wasn’t being fuddy-duddy. Quite the opposite. Harry was down with the kids, calling them “the most engaged generation in history” and accusing the mainstream media – hello! – of “distorting the truth” and “trying to manipulate the power of positive thinking”. Yes, that sounds about right.

However, he also accused social media of doing exactly the same and, prompted by his communist wife, quoted Martin Luther King Jr: “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” I hate to think what his old gran thinks about that. But then we learned that Her Majesty, a Queen, had herself gone all viral, issuing her first Instagram, which was greeted by leading fawners as “a perfect example of social media manners”.

You’d think that, at 92, the last thing the Queen would want to do was dip her toe in this sociopathic cesspit. I like my Royals to be stuffy, snooty and stuck in the past. LIke Prince Charles.

You never heard England’s Edward VII talk about social media. But here was Elizabeth I of Scotland babbling on about Charles Babbage, calling him the “world’s first computer pioneer”. Disgraceful. If the trolls have a pop at her too, she’ll only have herself to blame. I wouldn’t be surprised if she was also on LinkedIn, talking to fellow professionals about waving and handbags.

The sad thing about social media is that there’s no going back. It’s here to stay. True, moves are afoot to impose more rules on it, but these mainly involve liberal bigots telling people what they can and cannot say.

Ultimately, it may be the case that most people will be banned from social media, forcing them to relearn the morés of happier times when we insulted people to their their face and poked them in the stomach.

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SEVEN years after it looked like the Sun had finally set on the Sighthill Circle, its 17 stones have been realigned with the Moon.

Back in 2012, it looked they were going to be blootered by the cooncil in Glasgow, but a spirited campaign has seen them not only saved but moved to a new position where they can better receive messages from the cosmos.

Erected by prehistoric man in 1979, the stones were the work of a little known esoteric sect worshipping gods of the Celtic equivalent of Valhalla: the Job Creation Scheme.

The stones came to be loved by local folk, but also attracted the attention of the influential Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids, who liked to hold coffee mornings there. Now, far from being seen as getting in the way of progress, the stones have come to symbolise the regeneration of the area.

No one knows the original purpose of stone circles, which can be found in several parts of the British Isles. Some believe they may have been observatories, and some that they were places of ritual and sacrifice, while others think they were just put up by dafties. ****

WATCHING an American news item this week, featuring actual Americans speaking and everything, I was struck once again by the way they have to add the county or state to any given place-name that they mention.

You know. “I’m a cowboy from Chicago, Illinois.” Or: “I was raised in Ecclefechan, Tennessee.”

It’s as if we were to say: “I was walking down the road in Bathgate, West Lothian, when I was approached by a friend from Kirkcudbright, Dumfries and Galloway. We were later joined by a notable inebriate from Lumphinnans, Fife, and proceeded to make our way by bus to Berwick, Berwickshire.”

I’m surprised they don’t add their postcode or zip code as they call it for some reason (perhaps they’re being fly).

Even when they landed on the Moon in 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong – an American of Scottish descent – staggered doon the stairs of his space capsule and uttered the immortal words: “I have just landed on the Moon, Ooter Space.”

Maybe it’s because the US is made up of states, as the name might arguably suggest, rather than counties like Fife or Banffshire. But it still seems to me like too much information. ****

WHEN I left home in my teens, with a small knapsack and a teddy bear called Gerald, there was only one proper meal I could cook: Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie with Smash mashed potatoes. It made me the man I am today: ill.

The least said about the watery tatties the better. But the pie came in a tin, which seemed like a wonderful, space age novelty at the time, and there was also a chicken and mushroom version for anyone health conscious or on a diet.

Well, now Fray Bentos has joined the arguably faddy 21st century, producing its first meat-free pie, filled with vegetable balti. Brand owners Baxters describe it as “filling and comfortable”, which sounds right sexy to me.

You may scoff – so to say – but, since controversial bakery chain Greggs first produced its vegan sausage rolls in January, crowds have been gathering daily at its pastry-promising portals, and profits have gone through the roof.

That said, I am, at the time of going to press, undecided about trying FB’s veggie pie. Perhaps I could follow the inspiring example of comedian Count Arthur Strong with vegetarian sausages, and have it as the veg accompaniment to a proper steak and kidney one.

Read more – Andrew McKie: Salute the Royals for their success in treading a fine line