Last December (2025), I played Scrooge in a production of A Christmas Carol at The Arden Theatre in Faversham. But this is not about that. This is about giving up facebook. Facebook steals time and gives back nothing. It used to be good at keeping you in touch with friends. Not so much any more. Now it shows me videos of parrots, mainly.
But my hand automatically strays to my phone whenever I pause. Years of conditioning. So I needed something to replace the doom scrolling. It had occurred to me while doing the Dickens (not a euphemism), that I’d not actually read many of the classics – even the ones I was supposed to have read for A Level English Lit.
Which is how I found myself reading The Pickwick Papers and coming across this paragraph:
There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgment, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the opposite extreme, or he loses it altogether. The best way is to keep gently up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head; smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you thought it as good a joke as anybody else
As a society, we’re lighter on hats than we used to be, but this picture is still relatable. nearly two centuries after it was published. Imaging you’ve dropped a fiver instead of a hat. It’s that final phrase, “smiling pleasantly all the time” that gets me. Because even if the fiver (or the hat) gets irretrievably away from you. You must act as if it meant nothing to you anyway.