I love trolling. What's trolling? Basically the deliberate act of winding people up online via newspaper website comments boards. Getting some tedious 'the science is settled' lefty impotently raging gives me the horn.

So how does one do this successfully?

1) Pick your battle ground. Obviously The Guardian website is the gold standard of trolling. It's where virtue signalling lefties come to feel good about themselves. My role is to make them leave a little less smug, a bit more angry.

2) Never read the article you're commenting on. Let's face it, The Guardian is just rag a for journos who never grew out of sixth form 'it's not fair' agitprop. I can guess their viewpoints by the headline. The only originality is how ridiculously leftwing and authoritarian they can get. Blah blah blah. Ignore. Just fight the fanboys underneath.

3) If you have good arguments, use them. Show off. Pull apart threadbare assertions, expose ignorance, exploit contradictions. Make your arguments short, pithy and - most important - deliberately provocative. Earnest discussions are for bores. Take your point and simplify whilst amplifying. This acts like catnip to lefties; they can't resist piling onto a forbidden viewpoint. A full throated support of Trump usually works.

4) More fun - play the man, not the ball. It's so unfair and exasperating but it's guaranteed to get your target hopping mad as they fall off their high horse and scrabble around in the dirt with you.

5) Use humour. Lefties hate humour. They have this smug, condescending de haute en bas kind of sneer which - on the BBC and Channel 4 - passes as humour. Not to be mistaken for real humour. Doesn't work with a hostile audience. Drag your target from the comfort of a Radio 4 panel show circle jerk to a working men's club in Sunderland and 'did you spill my pint, mate?'

6) Create straw men and a fictitious mythology about your target. I owned one self-righteous lefty by constantly suggesting he used to work for Stephen Byers - the dreadful ex-Blairite cabinet minister (nothing more insulting to a Wurzel follower). They tried ignoring me, laughing it off, attacking me, using appeals to authority and then just outright fury. I win. You lose. Loser.

I call this strategy the 'Shakey' strategy. One ex-colleague made the mistake - just once - of coming to work wearing double denim. I made up this whole back story about how he was Shaking Stevens' biggest fan. It used to wind him up but he thought that by playing along with it, or laughing it off or ignoring it, I'd stop. Yeah, right. I'd be on a call and say "Sorry, I can't hear you as XXX is playing fucking Green Door at top blast again." From then on he was known as the Shakey guy by all. He left. We don't keep in touch.

7) Dicking about with people's online moniker's is always fun. If you can twist it to something obscene - great! If not change it to something funny. Or juvenile. Diminish your target by making them ridiculous. Although everyone pretends to be high-minded and want to follow a debate, if you change someone's moniker from 'love_Corbyn' to 'love_farmanimals' no one will take them seriously again. I win. You lose.

8) If all else fails, just go for straight out abuse. Something like 'I can hear the rustle of tin foil', 'did mummy let you use the computer again?', 'Isn't it time for your meds?', 'Shouldn't you be at school', 'Does it hurt not having a girlfriend?'... Low but effective.

9) Parroting. Just copy and paste your target's contribution but change a couple of words so the meaning is the opposite of that intended. Then end it with a jaunty - 'fixed it for you!' Keep doing it and ask them how long they've been a member of UKIP posting such right wing tosh.

10) For people who write pages of tedious shit bloviating about a subject in some lawyerly or condescending manner, just attach a comment at the bottom - like a teacher - 'Too long. Learn to be more succinct and people might read your stuff'. For the serious minded this triggers them like nothing else. You can then move to employ mockery or straw man whilst changing their moniker to something stupid or rude.

This may seem pathetic, girlfriend displacement activity but those cultural wars need to be fought. Mad ideas need to be challenged by all means necessary. Ridicule and mockery are actually serious weapons. All dictatorships hate humour. For in humour we find truth and the truth is often not spoken about whereas false narratives (like the emperor's new clothes) abound. Banned. No platformed. Fight. Fight the power.

“I saw a shadow touch a shadow’s hand. On Bleecker Street.”

— Paul Simon - Bleecker Street

When I first went to New York, American Express put me up at The Marriott on West Street. After a hard day in the office I would ask my colleagues out for a beer. And sometimes they would oblige... For a beer. One beer. Before departing for New Jersey. Leaving me alone in New York.

The Marriott on West Street is down at the bottom of Manhattan Island, all skyscrapers, bustling with life during the day but dead after work. What to do? On my first trip to New York?

Letting art be my guide, I summoned a yellow taxi and told the cabbie to take me to Bleecker Street. Due to the Simon and Garfunkel song, it was the only uptown street I knew. So he took me - circuitously I found later - up to Greenwich Village.

And so I wandered around. Had some beers in 'coffee shops' where I had to get used to putting dollars on the bar before ordering my drink. Lighting up a Marlboro I thought - hey! - this is living. All my idols - Neil Diamond, Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, had walked these very streets. All I lacked was my own Suzi Rotolo immortalised on The Freewheeling Bob Dylan:-

Now that image is well known. Less well known is the cover of The Paul Simon Songbook where Paul poses (influenced by Dylan, no doubt) with his then girlfriend Kathy Chitty (of Kathy's Song fame):-

The album cover above is framed and hung in my lounge.

So what does this show? Not much, in the receding view of history. A first time visitor to a great city goes somewhere mentioned in a song. But to me it was real. It was living art. All of my life - then - seemed to be an unwritten novel, a poem - a song, awaiting to be sung.

I suppose life is an ever diminishing version of that little story: The search for the new, the openness of naivety, the finding of oneself, wherever that may be. I suppose we all search for the thrill and expectation I felt during that first taxi ride between West Street and Bleecker Street.

And sometimes we find that feeling. But usually we don't. We all live in between.

Tim

How To Troll

Between West Street and Bleecker Street