I’m flailing about in the grip of a new syndrome it just wouldn’t have been possible to contract say, twenty years ago when life was more innocent. Twenty years ago we could leave the house without our phone and not immediately start hyperventilating and we didn’t have to check an inbox every three minutes. Nor did we have to waste hours pondering the micro-blurts of gossip on Twitter or the nasty anonymous comments on other people’s websites. Okay, so there was hate mail twenty years ago but it wasn’t posted cruelly and instantly online; the folks who hated you back then had to really commit to the contents of their poisonous letters while queuing for stamps. (I was once sent anonymous hate mail over the name I chose for my daughter. What was that about?) But above all, back then there were far fewer passwords that needed to be recalled […]