I got trolled a little bit this week and the only important point is to stress just how astoundingly tiny that little bit was. I mean, come on, I’m a middle-aged white man, I will never know from actual trolling. Not even when I’m English but just used that American construction, “never know from”.

This is entirely off the point, but there’s just something I like about that phrasing. Also the way Americans might say something “most every day.” Can’t figure out why that pleases me so. I do know, for instance, that I like the word “gotten” because there’s such rage about it in England over what’s seen as the bastardisation of the language — yet in truth the word is British English through and through. It’s just that America held on to it, kept using it, protected it, and somehow we in the UK forgot it ever existed.

Anyway.

I’m obviously thinking about this trolling since I’m here talking to you two days – no, wait, um, nope, can’t be sure: it’s either two or three days since it happened. Might be four: it’s been a long week.

I am perturbed that someone could use my personal email address, the one that I’ll give you if I haven’t already, yet which I never share publicly. But the actual insulting bit, no. Neither now when I am struggling to remember what he said nor in the very moment when I read it, at no point could I manage an entire shrug.

All that happened is that some fella decided to email me to say I am a terrible writer. Finally, I thought, someone who agrees with me.

Yet it was a shitty email in all sorts of senses and I didn’t keep it around to study, but I don’t think a team of linguistic experts would have been able to determine what precisely he didn’t like. I’m saying it was a man although I didn’t register the name, but you know it was a man.

He did specifically mention my blog, but that’s just screwy. This is my only blog, right here, and he definitely cannot have meant this because whether it’s written well or terribly, it’s not written to him, it’s written to you.

So I had a little bump in the road as I read it, trying to fathom what it was about. But if I cannot overstress how little this little bit of trolling was, I also cannot find the words to describe how briefly it was in front of me. I am a fast reader, it was a short email, I took it all in with one glance, registering that there was nothing useful there and blocking the sender before I could even finish thinking the word “tosser”.

Only…

This man decided to write to fill me in on my being a bad writer and it’s that act, that decision, that’s had me wondering. I’ve wondered before of course, whenever you hear of the foul things so many people get sent over social media, but this act of flinging out a quite petulant email put it all back in my head again.

There is not one single pixel of a chance that I would ever email a writer to say they are crap – note, not to say that I think they are, that I don’t happen to like their work, but that they actually are crap.

I wouldn’t do it because I’m pragmatic, I might need to work with them some day. I wouldn’t do it because I’m a professional writer and I know very well what you see on screen or read on paper goes through a hell of a journey to get there and we can never know what has happened on someone else’s journey. And I wouldn’t do it because, I hope, I’m a nice guy.

Yet even though I believe all of this to be true, in all practical honesty, these reasons may not be why I wouldn’t do it.

The real reason might be this: who has the time?