James is totally Blunt in book about his greatest Twitter hits

Twitter is awful – like a school noticeboard, where people are allowed to pin messages saying how much they don’t like you. And although I tried ignoring the crowd of students gathered around each note, sniggering over their shoulders at me, it brought no satisfaction. So, I decided to post replies. 

This has not been without its dangers. Should I cross some invisible but definitive line, they, the Twitterati, could, en masse, commit me to the ultimate purgatory – they could block me, or worse still, cancel me. But this is the world in which we live; where once we were told to keep our opinions to ourselves, with the invention of Twitter, everybody thinks their opinion should be heard. And opinions are like arseholes – everybody has one.

And so, it began – a journey of mutual humiliation. A journey into the depths of the gutter that is the human soul. To find out just how mean to each other we could  be, and to justify it by the number of retweets and likes, and the size of crowd gathered to watch.

But through all of this, I still have hope. Once upon a time, my legacy was a three-minute, thirty-second pop song about some girl I’d seen on the underground. Instead, for a day in my lifetime, or maybe even two, I might be able to ascend the greatest of heights, to conquer the strongest of foes. Yes, if I get this right, I might just be able to do the unimaginable – to win the internet. And, in doing so, to have bestowed upon me the greatest of all prizes: to have men I’ve never met, nor wanted to meet, shake me by the hand, and say, over and  over and over again, ‘mate, I don’t like your music, but I love your tweets’.

This is what I’m fighting for. Right here, in the colosseum of our time, I am the gladiator, and you, the baying crowd.
Let’s do this.

This is an extract from How to be a Complete and Utter Blunt, Diary of a Reluctant Social Media Sensation by James Blunt, published by Constable.