Sir David Amess: Blaming social media is a distraction

The murder on 15 October of Sir David Amess, the MP for Southend West, was horrifying by any metric. A 25-year-old has been charged and will be tried next spring, with the Terrorism Act invoked.

The killing came almost five and a half years after the murder of Yorkshire MP Jo Cox, in a crime where the UK’s Crime Prosecution Service subsequently confirmed that her killer is officially classified as a terrorist.

One MP killed by a far-right terrorist; another by an alleged Islamic terrorist. There have been other murders and attempted murders – in 2010, MP Stephen Timms barely survived stabbing by an Islamic terrorist. In 2000, Andy Pennington, the aide of Lib-Dem MP Nigel Jones, was murdered trying to protect Mr Jones, by a disgruntled constituent who seemed to have forgotten the help the MP had given him previously.

But in the wake of the death of Ms Cox, there were calls for a kinder, gentler politics.

In the wake of the death of Sir David, there have been calls for a kinder, gentler public and political discourse.

Only days after the latest killing, Mark Francois MP called for a new ‘David’s Law’ in memory of his friend, to curb online targeting of MPs and end anonymity on social media.

And here is where we run into problems.

Let’s be clear: the political and public discourse in this country has been dreadful for years. And the online abuse of politicians – or anyone else – is unacceptable. Threats of death or rape are inexcusable. Any improvement would be most welcome.

But whatever Mr Francois might like to think, it’s probably not Facebook or Twitter where someone was groomed to be a terrorist and the murderer of Sir David, should that be proven in court to be the case.

Yet the MP for Rayleigh told the House of Commons that he was “minded to drag Mark Zuckerberg [CEO of Facebook] and Jack Dorsey [CEO of Twitter] to the bar of the house … if necessary kicking and screaming so they can look us all in the eye and account for their actions or rather their inactions that make them even richer than they already are”.

There’s a certain lack of self-awareness here – and not just in terms of the violent actions he was prepared to carry out – but because Mr Francois is himself a rabble-rouser, to use a rather old-fashioned term.

In 2019, he compared Luxembourg’s Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission from 2014-2019, to Hitler, noting that “Herr Juncker in the bunker would say that, wouldn’t he?”

He told his fellow Conservative MP Phillip Hammond, a minister at the time, “up yours” on Radio 4 regarding Brexit and, on another occasion, went full Luftwaffle, noting: “My father was a D-Day veteran. He never submitted to bullying by any German. Neither will his son!”

Bombast and rhetoric to amuse the masses. But not grown-up politics.

I have no reason to believe that Mr Francois isn’t deeply upset by the brutal murder of his friend, but he himself is part of a deeper, wider problem.

And he is far from being alone. In the wake of the murder, Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner was accused by several commentators of aiding this situation with her recent description of Conservatives as “scum”.

No – it didn’t cause the murder in any way (it seems that the accused had been planning something for two years, so it’s not the pandemic either), but it doesn’t help.

As Andrew Rawnsley makes clear in today’s Observer, such language is not new. Winston Churchill suggested Labour would institute a British Gestapo, while Nye Bevan called the Conservatives “lower than vermin”. Neither played well with the public – but neither had anything to do with a social media that didn’t exist.

But back to Mr Francois. His party leader, Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has had many columns published in the Daily Telegraph containing lies – ‘EU to outlaw prawn cocktail crisps’ is one of the more obviously egregious.

The Daily Mail also excels in this – and in whipping up hatred and distrust. It’s spent decades demonising public service workers – teachers and social workers in particular. I recall my mother singing from the Mail hymn sheet about how teachers, untrained in sport, were refusing to do unpaid overtime, meaning that we didn’t win much at the Olympics.

As the UK has seen in recent years, splashing the cash – via the National Lottery, to fund training properly – Is What Actually Works.

To be fair to my mother, when she heard counter points – such as why should anyone do unpaid overtime in something they’re not qualified in – she acknowledged that those points were logical.

But are we less respectful than previous generations? Social media amplifies things, but otherwise, I really don’t think it’s so simple.

In the last year of his life, my father was grumbling about Gary Lineker’s politics. “I can’t respect people with different views to mine,” he opined. “Oh,” I responded, “so you don’t respect me?”

That, apparently, was “different” – presumably in that blood somehow defies one’s own logic somehow. But, y’know ... Mail readers. In those last months, I started taking him a regular copy of Private Eye. We never discussed the contents, but he actually stopped the carers picking him up a Mail every day. Something had jolted him – and one day, he ruefully hinted that it was the Eye, when he told me not to pick him up a Mail when I went to the shops for him.

Yet I also recall, a week or so before the 2016 referendum, his shouting at me, over the phone: “I don’t want to be ruled over by the Nazis!”

And I think back to some of the things he said over the decades and it was little different to what happens on social media – albeit without the ‘coarse’ language. Because for my parents, saying ‘fuck’ was far worse than much else.

Furriners were to be despised (well, until you met them personally). The English, the English, the English were best ... “I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest”. As Flanders and Swann put it. Satirically. Yet my mother in particular seemed to hold it ups as a second national anthem.

Long enough in the tooth, I can look back and think longingly of the era when the Telegraph was a very fine newspaper, which absolutely kept opinion and reportage separate. How sad to look at the paper’s online forums now and see a nasty, anti-intellectual bear pit. How sad to see a once-great publication as a propaganda sheet for a serially lying prime minister.

For clarity here, I am no social media saint – but a lot of what I’ve written here expresses why I get so exasperated that I swear about and indeed, to, politicians. What recourse do we have when the prime minister can lie in the House of Commons with apparent impunity, yet anyone saying, in the House of Commons that he does so, is punished?

Why is wearing a tie in the House of Commons (for men, obviously) important, yet the prime minister lying is less so? And let’s be quite clear ... Boris Johnson lies almost as readily as he moves his lips – and that is a fact. Most of his Cabinet are little better.

But the Murdochification of British media – together with the demands of 24-hour digital news media and the need for click bait for revenues – are other factors that have brought us here.

Social media is without doubt a problem that humanity has nowhere near solved yet, and it needs dealing with, but it is *not* the origin of the issues that we face now – specifically in the UK – in terms of public and political discourse, and pretending it is, can only be convenient for others who are part of the problem.

The murder of Sir David Amess was – as every murder is – awful. But to try to pretend that it is somehow and primarily the result of the failings of social media issues is, while those failings most certainly exist, a deflection from reality.

 

 

The incontinence of noise

Young, well-spoken and well-to-do, she sat at the back of a bus, phone to ear, explaining to a friend in a carrying voice about that afternoon’s appointment with her gynecologist, seemingly oblivious to all those around who were perhaps less than enthusiastic about the details of the encounter.

On a train, speeding north from London, a young man, seated at a table in a standard-class carriage, opened his laptop and decided that this was the perfect environment in which to conduct a business video conference call. Everyone within three or four seats in all directions was included – irrespective of their wishes or even the interests of business confidentiality.

These are two snapshots of a modern Britain where humans have become noise incontinent. And they will be familiar to most of us.

But it is not just a matter of conversations made public. It’s one thing for headphones to leak sound, but at least the wearer is making an effort.

Yet it is now the norm, in urban areas, for the first good weather of the year to see windows and balcony doors flung open, and music ‘shared’ with neighbours.

“Music,” that is, consisting of little more than booming bass. The same “music” that you’ll hear from passing cars, whether the windows are down or not.

But this is not simply a matter of individual behavior.

In shopping arcades, going far beyond the curse of muzak, shops blast out sound – presumably, because a psychologist somewhere has discovered that hi-tempo, booming tracks encourage spending and quickly.

The Arndale in Manchester is one example: on a visit one Sunday morning, only the Waterstones Bookshop and Games Workshop were peaceful – although both were busy. Even the Disney Store was playing music loudly – hi-tempo and with a beat, albeit rather more in keeping with little pink princesses.

On a larger scale, it is now apparently acceptable for a rave festival to be arranged and staged within 50 metres of homes, and if residents do not like feeling their bones rattled, that’s their misanthropy.

It never is, incidentally, Chopin rattling someone else’s windows – or Johnny Cash or Dean Martin or even Abba or the Stones.

But try to find a coffee shop – chain or independent – that doesn’t insist on providing some sort of soundtrack to your morning cappuccino. It might just be the radio, but you could be forgiven for thinking that we are scared to sit peacefully; to allow ourselves the opportunity to hear ourselves think.

There is a narrowing of basic good manners here – not a conscious one, but resulting from a sense of individual entitlement that requires no justification and expects no challenge.

‘Why do you think it’s fair for you to make other people listen to your conversation/music?’ This is not a question that usually earns a classier philosophical response than some form of take on a shrugged ‘because’.

Although in order to do so would require a way of explaining why the ‘right’ to converse or play your music in such a way as to force it on others trumps their right not to have it thus inflicted. Since nobody is saying that you cannot play your music or have your private conversation, then that would be difficult.

Perhaps much of it is about consumption.

On one level, we consume the gadgets that allow us to converse wherever we want. And then we consume anything we put on them. Except that, since we are encouraged increasingly to keep it in the ‘cloud’, we don’t really have it at all. When we want to conspicuously consume that tune again, we have to download or stream it once more – possibly with added consumption via whatever charges our telecommunications provider might levy.

On another level, there is a growing emphasis on consumption as a core part of citizenship: see all manner of things, from the small-state fundamentalism of the concept of the ‘citizen consumer,’ to the rising importance in the economy of the retail sector (and therefore of our personal and collective consumption).

You can find florid declarations of spending as a patriotic duty to aid the nation’s economy, while increasing suggestions that we’re in for a period of sustained low interest rates (in part because of past and present spending on ludicrously-inflated mortgages) produces a concomitant sense that we might just as well spend our hard-earned, then.

Once having consumed, we then have the right to enjoy that consumption. And after all, if it is a patriotic act we have carried out, then who can deny us enjoying it in whatever way we please? There’s no such thing as society any more anyway.

Now consider the onslaught on personal privacy of the last decade or so: the UK as the CCTV capital of the world; attempts by governments to introduce ‘snoopers’ charters’ to combat terrorism and child abuse º the two terrors of our age: all produce a semi-constant response of how, ‘if you’ve nothing to hide, you’ve nothing to fear’.

The ‘rights’ and ‘entitlement’ of the conscientious consumer sit well with an era in which the desire for privacy can be viewed as an admission of some guilt or other.

Consume, let others see your consumption – and never worry if you’re being overheard or watched, because it’s happening anyway. Quiet and privacy cannot be bought and sold: they have little value.

This incontinence of sound – this droning, banging, driveling bombardment of noise – is itself symptomatic of something wider: of a dumbed-down public discourse where whoever shouts loudest is heard; where considered arguments are battered out of the way by sensation and fact-free claims.

Will it take until all the satellites fail and all the ‘clouds’ burst and all the gadgets seize up to make us appreciate once more, quietness, a private conversation and music enjoyed without the need to foist it on others?

Or before then, will it dawn on people that all this incontinent noise is simply one more cover for our intellectually incontinent politicians and the corporatocracy on whose behalf they work?

Spot the war profiteering disguised as charidee

Don't forget the profit opportunities

A few weeks ago, flicking through my Twitter feed, I came across a retweeted contribution from one Douglas Carswell, the newly-elected – and first – UKIP MP.

In just 147 characters, he managed to mention both “sofa government” and “citizen consumers”.

The former is all about government policy being made by senior ministers and a handful of advisors.

The latter refers to an idea that citizens, via their consumption, can ensure that companies make ethical decisions.

It has been done. In the 1980s, declining sales of aerosols producing CFCs forced manufacturers to rethink the products and come up with less environmentally damaging solutions.

But apart from such high-profile campaigns, how much can it work?

For instance, will enough people to make a difference boycott companies that pay such low wages that the taxpayer has to top them up in order for workers to be able to afford to live?

Underlying it all is the ideology of deregulation: if the consumer makes the choices, no government intervention would be needed. And, of course, The Market, given free rein, will provide the ‘perfect’ results (as though the market were somehow not entirely dependent on human intervention, including political intervention and decisions – but that’s a different subject).

All of which sounds lovely, but is as divorced from reality as telling people that, if regulations are removed and those at the top were just allowed to do whatever they want in order to make money, the increased wealth would ‘trickle down’ to everyone else.

It also supposes that the majority of people are, when being consumers, able to make ethical choices that often mean spending at least a little more cash – or that most people have the time or inclination to investigate the ethics behind every purchase that they make, which itself often means digging quite deep behind the façade of corporate bullshit.

Blingtastic way to remember the war dead

In terms of affording the ethical, the fallacy of trickle-down is a major factor in why incomes for the majority have fallen, putting increasing numbers of people in a position where they can less and less afford to look for those ethical options.

Research in the US suggests that consumers (or at least some) want the companies that they buy from to be involved with ‘causes’.

I’ve dealtwith ‘cause marketing’ on this blog previously, but this is just another take on the same thing, spun a little differently and taking it to the level of political ideology.

Over the weekend, there appeared on my TV an advert from Sainsbury’s, linking that store with the Royal British Legion’s poppy appeal.

The company offered, among other things, to recycle your poppy if you return it to the store after use. The advert describes a commitment to the past – and the future – with images of an elderly man (a veteran, presumably) and a young boy (a future veteran?), while also noting that stores sell a range of poppy-related objects (such as an umbrella), with proceeds going to the Legion.

So, is Sainsbury’s doing all this out a genuine sense of charity/patriotism?

Well, it might be. It is entirely possible that the company’s head honchos feel a deep commitment to remembrance and to the wellbeing of veterans.

But on the other hand, that’s not why it’s being advertised in such a way. It’s being advertised to show the company in such a light that it will encourage customers to shop there.

That is not ethical: it is nothing other, at core, than trying to profit from war.

Oh, Sainsbury’s might not make a penny from any poppy-related purchase or act of education or recycling – some of these might even cost the company money. But all that is an investment.

The chances of someone responding to that advert just to pop this year’s used poppy in a recycling tub (instead of in the recycling bag or box they get from the local waste collection service), and not then doing some shopping there seems a tad unlikely.

Will people really decide to make an extra shopping trip just to go to Sainsbury’s – when they do not do so usually – to buy a poppy brolly – when you can choosefrom seven different poppy umbrellas at the Royal British Legion’s own online shop – and then walk out and not pick up a few odds and ends for that midweek supper?

This is about persuading the ‘citizen consumer’ to shop at Sainsbury’s because it shows obvious, outward support for a cause that that shopper cares about. The adverts are deliberately placed to coincide with the annual remembrance ceremonies and Armistice Day.

They won’t be appearing next April, with a message that Sainsbury’s is still caring about remembrance and veterans, even when no poppies are on sale and no commemorations are scheduled.

Poppy pizzas from Tesco

If Sainsbury’s cared about remembrance and veterans, and not profits, it wouldn’t spend hundreds of thousands of pounds creating advertising campaigns on the issue. It could donate that cash to the Legion instead, without making a hoo-ha about it that simply screams: ‘just look how good we are by doing charidee stuff’.

This is cause marketing, aimed at the citizen consumer, and with the prime intent of increasing footfall and, with that, profits.

Of course, Sainsbury’s is far from being alone in such behavior. Indeed, Bill King spotted Tesco selling ‘poppy pizzas’.

A Tesco pizza is probably tasteless anyway, but this takes it to a whole new level.

And there will be be countless more companies playing the same sort of games.

So perhaps the ‘real’ citizen consumer should, then, deliberately refuse to spend money at companies that so blatantly exploit the war dead to make a buck.

They might also consider that the Royal British Legion needs funds to help veterans, because governments that send people to war rarely seem much interested in those veterans once they return, and thus the public is left to fill the pick up the pieces via charitable donation.

But then again, all this would involve real and meaningful ethical or moral choices: and that is not what the concepts of ‘citizen consumer’ and ‘cause marketing’ are remotely about.

Keep calm – and carry on being grumpy

Even if ‘50 is the new 40,’ as some claim, it’s very much the case that I am now middle aged. And with it, grumpy.

And this has been a week for grumpiness to thrive.

No, I’m not “grumpy” about children being blown to bits as they sleep; or about an increasingly vicious civil war between, on the one hand, a deeply unpleasant dictator and, on the other, rebels that include a bunch of fundamentalists who are too extreme even for Al-Qaeda to want to be associated with.

Or that Iraq is cracking up – as predicted – with some of those same nutters taking over swathes of the country; or that more nutters in Nigeria are kidnapping scores of women and girls, and killing many more hundreds of people in the name of their particular sky pixie.

Or that someone – concrete evidence appears to be somewhat lacking at present – blew a civilian plane out of the skies in the middle of their own grubby, nasty little nationalistic war, killing the 298 innocent men, women and children on board, including many scientists who have been leading the global fight against HIV/Aids.

Or that our own government, hand-in-hand with a complicit media, is continuing to push policies that increase the prevalence of poverty in the UK, including among those who are in work, while at the same time demonising the vulnerable and, in more and more cases, effectively driving them to their deaths.

Or that there is also, in the UK, increasing evidence of an Establishment cover-up of Establishment abuse of children.

These things don’t make me “grumpy”: these things make me fucking furious.

But today, let’s focus on a few causes of the “grumpy”.

It was 29 July when I was told, via Twitter, to contact Carphone Warehouse by phone.

I refused, because I want something in writing – even if only digitally so.

Let me explain.

I had just discovered that the contract for my mobile phone (the only phone I have) was up. The handset was originally from Carphone Warehouse, while the service was provided by Orange.

It had dawned on me that the contract was nearing its end – not least because, on 14 July, I took a call from a young-sounding man who told me as much, and then tried to engage me in a conversation about renewing or a new deal.

I refused to discuss it on the grounds that I was at work and that I didn’t have any paperwork with me. Not that that stopped him from trying to ignore this and push me into the conversation that he wanted to have.

Now I assumed – rather naively, it now seems – that he was from Orange, since he clearly knew about the expiration of a contract I had. To be frank, I’d forgotten that the handset was from a different company.

That was the second attempt to call me and, between then and this Monday, there were at least nine further attempted calls from that number – a Nottingham landline – that I have a record of.

Quit phoning me, you duplicitous scum!

I refused to answer those I was aware of when the phone was ringing, although I was getting more and more pissed off by what was getting damned close to harassment.

I was steeling myself to ring back and cancel my connection with them.

But before I managed that, I took a call from Carphone Warehouse on Monday morning, telling me that my contract on the handset was up and would I like to renew/upgrade etc.

My suspicions were aroused, and I verified with the caller that I now owed the company nothing – even if I kept the handset.

A short while later, over lunch, there was another of those attempts to phone me from the Nottingham number (0115 828 5045).

By this time, I was seething. So I rang the number back – to hear a recorded message telling me that it was a company called debtmastersdirect.co.uk.

This was the point at which the air turned blue.

What debt? Why the hell is a company with that name harassing me?

I looked them up online – sure enough, they claim to deal with debt, insolvency etc. I Googled further – they have a reputation for harassment, on the basis of comments from people on various forums.

And also from various forums, Carphone Warehouse has form for selling customers’ data.

On Tuesday, after fielding yet another call from Carphone Warehouse trying to push me into rapidly agreeing a new contract, I called Orange to check a few things with them.

Now, here’s where it gets a bit complicated. I have two contracts with Orange – one for the phone that I got from Carphone Warehouse, and one for a tablet that Carphone Warehouse knows nothing about.

Although the handset contract expired this week, the service contract has a few more weeks to run.

The contract on the tablet, which I bought outright, direct from the maker, expired a short while ago. Orange had missed that, as had I.

Now, given that nobody bothered to ring me about that contract, it seems unlikely that it is Orange that is being careless with my data: why would they sell or pass on details of just one contract when there’s another that’s already expired?

And the pestering has, in time terms, come much more obviously closely to the expiration of my contract for the handset with Carphone Warehouse.

Gambling is not one of my vices, but were I a betting woman, my money would be on Carphone Warehouse as the source from which debtmastersdirect got hold of my details.

Now that could mean either that the company sells or hands on data, or that its data security is poor.

I took to Twitter to complain that the company was selling data.

Companies don’t like that sort of social media coverage, so it responded quite quickly by saying: “we are very sorry to hear this Amanda, if you wish we can remove you from our callers lists?”

It wasn’t Carphone Warehouse calling, though – so how could it help to be taken off one of “our callers [sic] lists”?

Remember, it was a Nottingham number that leads directly to a company calling itself debtmastersdirect, which obviously has sidelines in trying to duplicitously bully people into new deals.

I asked Carphone Warehouse if that tweet meant that they were admitting selling data. They responded that they never, ever sell data.

They suggested phoning their customer helpline. Nope. I want this in writing.

They suggested I use the complaint forms on their website. I did, sending them a lengthy screed on Tuesday, detailing the situation and asking, politely, for an explanation.

As of right now –more than 72 hours after been emailed a serious complaint – they have made no reply. So much for customer ‘service’.

And that is what makes me grumpy. One way or another, this is a company that has decided that it has a business ethos of ‘screw the customer’, then ignore them and just hope they go away.

Orange were a little more helpful: once I’d clarified that I had no debt with them, they admitted that, while they say they do not sell data, they do sometimes share it with companies that they have business relationships with, and the very non-pushy human voice at the end of the phone told me that, “unfortunately” they have no control over that data after that.

I may have been naïve in instantly believing that that Nottingham caller was from Orange. But when did we develop into a society where we start from an assumption that businesses can simply treat us with contempt, that it is entirely acceptable for grubby little companies to harass you duplicitiously – and that’s it’s our responsibility to check all these things first?

That’s remarkably similar to throwing the onus for dealing with bullying on to the bullied, isn’t it?

Right, that’s one of this week’s gripes.

One of London's typical sights

Up next is the total lack of bins around King’s Cross station that I noticed when I was walking through just this morning.

Oh, there are plenty of places to pick up a coffee or a can of something or so on, and public space in front of the renovated station, which is just so much better than the ’70s monstrosity that it has replaced, includes a mass of places to sit – but where the hell are the bins?

It’s no wonder central London is such a shabby, scruffy mess every single day.

Having used a single incident of the IRA planting a bomb in a railway station bin as an excuse to get rid of vast numbers of bins and thus save the money required to have them emptied regularly, councils have now hived off refuse collection to private companies that do as little as possible in order to gain as much profit from the taxpayer as possible.

The other thing that’s visible with the rubbish is a clear increase in the number of rough sleepers in central London.

I was at Euston station early on Monday morning for the first time in some months. Now I have a clue about what’s happening in this country, but even I found shocking the sight of at least three people folding up bedding on the grass outside the station, while another lay cocooned in a dirty blanket. I have never seen that before.

There are frequently rough sleepers outside the old Thameslink station when I travel through in an early morning, while recently, I’ve also seen people on a mattress on Northdown Street, while earlier this week, there was someone asleep on the wall outside an office building on lower Pentonville Road.

But that’s not the stuff of grumpiness – that’s the stuff of fucking furious.

And for today, let’s stick with the grumpiness – and let’s talk about cigarettes. Or, to be rather more precise, Gauloises.

Now set aside the health issues. I smoke. And I do like a Gauloises.

Until recently, they were available in some shops in the UK. In Hackney, I could get them at a Costcutter on Hackney Road. However, since the Co-op took that over and rebranded it, the range of tobacco products has been cut – including those.

That left a shop on Marchmont Street and one opposite Borough Market. A newsagent off Euston Road found them from one of the wholesalers and would get them regularly for me – he also found that, once he had them in stock, then other customers would buy them too.

Not for Brits any more

But now nobody has them.

Yesterday, via Twitter, Imperial Tobacco – which bought the brand in 2008 – told me that: “Regrettably we took the decision to cease distributing Gauloises in the UK”.

I’ve asked (politely) why, and am awaiting an answer.

In the interim, I assume that, since there is no indication that the company is ceasing production – and it was easy enough to get them in Paris – it’s more a case of there not being ‘enough’ customers wanting them in the UK to make ‘enough’ profit.

But the wider point is that it provides yet another illustration of the reduction of choices available in many areas of life to UK consumers.

Where, for instance, do we have the sort of small, independent tobacconists that one finds in every city and every village, not just in somewhere like France, but in places like Germany too?

French newsagents fascinate me in general, with a range of magazines that goes way beyond what most places stock here. They have magazines about philosophy – on general display! And not just in Paris!

We, on the other hand, have an increasingly homogenised world, where vast corporates get to decide what we will be sold and what we will not be sold; a world where meaningful choice, via a wide range of small independents rather than vast numbers of a very small number of companies, is being continually reduced – not least if you have a limited budget.

So there you have it: three snapshots, taken over just four days, that reveal something about this lunatic asylum of a country, and what 30-plus years of greed-is-good, cut-throat, no-such-thing-as-society, screw-you, bankocracy and corporatocracy-supporting politics means in day-to-day terms.

And strangely enough, those very same political attitudes have played a substantial role in causing all the things I listed at the beginning of this post too; the things that make me rather more than merely “grumpy”.