X?

          When Twitter became X, I was faced with a dilemma. The home screen on my phone is devoted to all the various communications apps (whether I use them or not) and I had become used to seeing the friendly little birdie symbol perched eagerly in the bottom left hand corner, where it had been since I first adopted it. Then, one day, it changed suddenly into a sinister-looking white X on a deadly black background and I didn’t like the look of it at all. It reminded me of the Z painted on Putin’s assault vehicles, aggressive and devoid of empathy.

          Actually, I had stopped consulting Twitter some time ago, despairing somewhat at its limits as a medium of reasoned discourse, so there is absolutely no chance of my diving into X in the hope that things have got better. If the designer’s brief was to come up with a logo that says “nasty, aggressive, intolerant and macho”, then they nailed it. Of course, we know that the X logo is all part of Elon Musk’s persona anyway and I suspect that any ‘brief’ would have been simply an instruction to make the existing graphic function on a small screen. Whatever, the result is that what I see is the bird of hope crushed into oblivion by the steamroller of populism.

          And my dilemma? Since I couldn’t bear to see the horrid X every time I looked at my phone, I had to either delete it or banish it to the last page of apps, the one where reside all those that are little used due to their being obscure, useless or incomprehensible, i.e. system tools that you dare not delete. I chose to keep X, on the grounds that, one day, I might need it for research or reference purposes (it is, after all, a communications tool of sorts), so I dragged it to the back page, where it doesn’t really belong: it ought to be on the front page, where all the other comms live, neatly organised in a subtly graduated pattern (distinguishable only by me) that foregrounds my most frequently-used apps and leaves the others languishing on the margins.

          You’re probably thinking that I need to lighten up, but I like to adhere to systems for a reason: it makes my life easier to manage. And not just in the realm of digital filing. Take the fridge, for example (which is sort of what happened this week). After a few days of nose-wrinkling, I detected the source of an unpleasant smell in the kitchen: it was a festering damp patch, of mysterious origin, on the concrete floor behind the fridge. I moved the fridge to another position while the source was traced and where it must remain until the concrete dries out. Days later, I keep reaching for the fridge only to find there is a void where the fridge should be. And exactly the same thing happened when I moved the Spotify app (inadvertently) to a different position on the phone screen: months later I am still unaccustomed to its ‘new’ position but, worse, can’t restore it to the old one precisely because its removal was inadvertent.

          I would like to think I was not always so rigidly dependent on organised systems, habitual behaviours and predictable outcomes. I recall that, briefly, in my youth, there was spontaneity, flexibility and openness, all of which were eventually reined in by schooling, the pressures of cultural conformity and – it has to be admitted – my own innate need for order and tranquillity. Still, I have a coping mechanism: it’s called ‘conscious spontaneity’ and consists of making spaces for free-form activities between the otherwise pre-allocated slots. Some people call them holidays.