Hello to you

I read this thing recently that was all about how social media is turning everybody into narcissists (I needed spell check for that) whether they realise it or not, and it made a lot of horrifying sense to me. I don’t know if it’s because I am halfway through my life now and am frankly bored out of my brain by myself - and have long given up hoping for an early morning miracle whereby I go to the bathroom mirror and it’s Eva Mendes or Natalie Portman staring back at me instead - but really, does anybody care whether I just drank a really average flat white or got sweaty with Harry Styles? No. They do not. It’s not very interesting really. Sometimes I read through my profile feed on Twitter and want to stab myself with many many drawing pins or just gag myself with heavy duty duct tape. Shut up, you ridiculous bint is the recurring narration of my rich interior life.

Also, the things people respond to continually amaze and appall me. On Instagram once, I posted the THE MOST INCREDIBLE PICTURE EVER of a spider web, taken very early in the morning, with sunlight bouncing off precariously dangling dewdrops. Apart from that time I took a selfie with Brian May, literally nothing has excited me more on the socials than posting that pic. I was convinced I was bringing together art and nature and it seemed even more miraculous given that my iPhone screen was smashed to buggery and I couldn’t see properly because my contact lenses were so itchy. About twenty people liked it. This made me very sad, and I lost my faith in the aesthetic proclivities of those following me on there. Someone’s blurry picture of a half eaten sandwich got more likes. (Admittedly, the bread was sourdough.) Whenever I post a selfie (for this purpose I think we should include any picture of ourselves we post regardless of who took it), it will always get considerably more likes than any time I attempt to be artistic. (What is everyone trying to tell me, I wonder…?) On the one hand, it's flattering. But I’m perturbed as to why I might find it flattering. I’m a grown up. I’m lucky enough to have people I love being nice to me on a regular basis in real life. They show me they like me by buying me a Picnic bar or bringing me a coffee in bed at my most dangerously grumpy hour of the day. Facebook has never bought me a Picnic bar.

Garrulous I may be, but I often think if it were not for what I do for a living, I may never have engaged with social media. I don’t even answer my phone very much - I’d go so far as to say I’m afraid of it when it rings and this is all because of childhood trauma from having to answer the phone and lie to people that my father didn’t want to speak to while he waved his arms in some kind of weird semaphore. I would feel very bad about this and not be able to look these people in the eye if I bumped into them with my mother in the Co-op. As a result, I am an excellent ghoster. It’s nearly always inadvertent but what happens is that I mean to respond to some people, but go through phases where I don’t know what to say, leave it too long and then feel like they think I might have slighted them and then just give up entirely on ever getting back to them and then they hate me. It’s like that time I went on a date with a golf psychologist (yes! That’s an actual job!) and there was nothing wrong with him but I went on holiday the following day and I just wasn’t in the headspace for conversation involving the tropics, teeing-off fear and birdies and was also concerned about roaming fees so I never replied to this perfectly nice chap and then felt bad and then felt like it would be all weird and so left him to his golf and being all psychological. It still haunts me a decade later. AND I DON’T EVEN BLOODY LIKE GOLF.

All this brings me to why I don’t relish writing newsletters or blogs or tweets etc., etc., much these days. No. That’s not quite correct. I do like writing them, but the way we consume writing or music or pictures now is so intensive, and everything feels like it’s trying to sell itself to you, that posting stuff feels like more unnecessary addition to this. You know how back in the day before ye olde internet if you liked an author you would read one book at a time, or if you liked a particular columnist you would have to wait a week before their next piece? It was digestible. You didn’t get beaten around the head by their ‘voice’ in a barrage of tweets about Strictly Come Dancing or Tom Daley’s package. The problem with culture on demand is that you can very quickly come to detest something you liked simply because there’s just too bloody much of it.

And yet, if I like something and further investigate the social media pages of a musician or writer and they don’t say very much or update regularly, I get a bit disappointed. So I understand that in 2016 it’s acceptable to remind people of gigs or music releases and such like, but I can’t help but feel it’s the artistic equivalent of selling you something you don’t necessarily need. Perhaps I shall caveat everything from now on with a ‘you may find this interesting, you may not’. I feel at the moment that I don’t have anything terribly compelling to say and I should just concentrate on writing - which I am doing, consistently - and recording new music. I am doing my annual Christmas show at the Tabernacle on Saturday December 10th 2016 and you can get tickets here: http://nerinapallot.bigcartel.com/products



Also, I will be playing Nunnington Hall in Yorkshire in November this year and tickets are available here:

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/nunnington-hall/features/music-at-nunnington-hall

And you can also now download the Year of EPs from my own store here:

http://nerinapallot.bigcartel.com/products

And I shall try to be better about updating FB and Twitter etc more often with things you may or may not find interesting.

I hope you have all had a good summer so far and are enjoying the Olympics that have been happening while all of us in Europe are fast asleep.

With love,

Nerina x