A little while ago, someone came to my daughter’s school and told the assembly that mobile phone signals were killing the world’s bees. It turns out that there is not much evidence to support this view.

I grew up in Apartheid era South Africa, and was told things, by teachers and authority figures, that really defy belief. When I was about 12, we had a class discussion about classified advertising in newspapers. We were talking about what information was relevant to include in an advert; what sort of questions to ask. The teacher listened to our ideas, and then suggested one herself: ‘You would want to know the race of the people selling something,’ she said, ‘you wouldn’t want to buy a mattress from a Portuguese family, for example, because they are very dirty people.’

At the time, two of the Portuguese children in the class (My white-only school had people from all over the world) were in my line of sight. They looked as if someone had fired a gun in the air. There were a couple of feeble protests from the rest of the class, which were brushed aside. ‘Its a fact,’ she said, ‘everybody knows it.’

Our textbooks were also full of lies: deliberate, cynical lies, designed to help justify a massive land grab. I remember being told that God had ordained, in his Holy Bible, that white people were rulers, and black people were servants. That the Soviets were plotting to overthrow the democracy of South Africa. That calls for one-person one-vote was just a cover for this sinister aim.

I therefore grew up with little respect for what people in authority were telling me. I didn’t doubt the sincerity of my teachers: most of them were obviously kind, decent people who wouldn’t harm a fly. They just believed what they had been told. The fact that I didn’t gave me a huge (and almost totally unjustified) sense of superiority. I could see what was really going on, and I was just a kid. How could adults be so stupid?

These teachers were just parroting the conventional view to children: that was pretty much their job description. They didn’t know it was all nonsense. The world is a complicated place, and people are just people. Within the limits of their own moral framework, they meant well.

Which brings me to the present. My kids are being told a lot about climate change at school, and I strongly suspect that their teachers know about as much about the science of this as most of my teachers knew about the true history of South Africa.

Does this matter? Isn’t combatting climate change a worthy enough cause, so that we can forgive some over-zealous statements, like how phones kill bees? But then, saving the world from the Soviets was a worthy cause too. And climate change is an issue which can be exploited, by people who then over-sell alternative medicine, and over-state the risks of vaccination. These people also mean well: some are neo-luddites trying to save the world from a technological future, and using climate change as a means to advance this agenda.

I love wikipedia, because it is a reference work which says to you: ‘Do not trust what you read here: its probably wrong. If you can make it less wrong, please do.’

Teachers do not have this disclaimer. My lesson to my kids is that they probably should. But then I might be wrong: it is their job to find out.

Why would someone as unqualified and uninformed as myself have the sheer gall to present his thoughts and opinions in a blog?

Perhaps I am just a narcissist, indulging myself with my own mental reflection. After all, very few people read what I write here.

For me, though, that is part of the point. The only people who tend to read this blog are people who already know me in some way. I don’t have to worry about what the larger world thinks of me: I am safe in my obscurity. I enjoy writing, and would like to get better at it, but it does make a huge difference – and largely a positive one – to know that at least one other person will read what you write. If you have to leave the house – even if you only need to get milk – you have a reason to change out of your dressing gown. But you would dress differently again if massed ranks of paparazzi were camped outside.

So a tiny readership, who already know to expect the kind of nonsense I serve up, is just right for me.

Also, I suppose I feel a kind of duty to the possibility that blogging offers: we live in a bright new dawn when almost anyone can make their feelings known. Not to do so, even in the microscopic way that I do, feels a bit like not voting when previous generations sacrificed so much to have the chance.

Perhaps I overstate it: which brings me to the last reason I can think of. This way, I will have a record of what I thought. So that I can look back in a year, or two, and think how wrong I was. Which is worth being reminded of regularly, if only to reduce the chance of becoming a narcissist.

I recently changed my Twitter account name with someone who shares my real-world name. He asked politely, so I swapped, and it was all very easy from a technical point of view.

The reaction I had was interesting. Some people I know were (naively, in my view) amazed I hadn’t demanded a lot of money, but my online friends – the people I know mainly, or solely from online interactions – seemed appalled. As I got closer to completing the switch I understood better why. With friends who have never actually met me, my username was as unique and personal as my face is to my non-online friends. It was like I had announced I was going to grow a beard, or die my hair green (like Cori).

But it reminded me of something I believe about social media – that exclusively online friendships are as real as any other kind of friendship.

The media is full of people who believe that excessive use of facebook, twitter, etc will result in alienation. That ‘real’ friendships will be lost as we lose the social skills necessary to maintain them. My experience tells me that the opposite is true.

Cities – although full of people – can be the most alienating environment on the planet, because cities allow us to physically exist alongside other humans without having to communicate. Online, you have no physical presence, and you can only exist by communicating. Your beauty, or lack of it, your size and strength, all count for nothing. All you have is your social skills. We get better at listening to other people, and weighing what we say, by communicating online.

Villages are frequently held up as the ideal model of human society. My experience is this: if you fit in, you are fine. If you don’t go with the flow, you stick out like a sore thumb. And if you are looking for someone to talk to about subjects that a bit out of the mainstream, you are out of luck. There is a reason that many people with ambition and imagination flee a village as soon as they can.

Social media allows us to make our own village.

Also, it seems that the one thing that people know about twitter is that people are always talking inconsequential nonsense. True. But inconsequential nonsense is the mortar that holds relationships together.

So changing my name was harder than I thought it would be when I agreed to do it. I felt like Bilbo giving up the ring to Gandalf. It was precious to me, but its better given to people who might do something with it.

To spare any suspense, I ought to point out that this is the finest film ever made. Really. Also, there are spoilers in the following, so beware.

This film was written, directed and produced by British filmmakers Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, in 1943. That is to say, squarely in the middle of the Second World War. And this is a propaganda film – but the type of propaganda film that only the British could produce: the Brit is portrayed as a bit of a fool. The most intelligent character, who plays his conscience and best friend, is a German. No one is actually called Blimp.

Winston Churchill himself asked officials to ensure the film was stopped ‘as a matter of the highest importance.’ It will come as no surprise to British people that he found defeating the Nazis easier than curbing the British sense of fair play, and the film was made.

This film attempts to do something few films do, let alone propaganda films: it challenges your preconceptions.

A little background: the most popular cartoonist in Britain at the time was a man called Low. One of the characters he created was a bloated, walrus-mustached colonel – called ‘Blimp’ – who would appear in a sauna (called Turkish Baths back then), wearing only a towel, and spouting off about how things had gone to rack and ruin since his day, how modern youth had no backbone. I seem to remember that Low was inspired to create him after reading a letter from a retired colonel insisting that former cavalry divisions – who now drove tanks – should still be made to wear spurs.

What this film does early on is present us with a retired colonel – who resembles the cartoon Blimp a great deal – and has a young man of enterprise confront him with a few home truths. We are then transported back in time, to when the colonel was himself a young man of enterprise – 1902. We see the same streets – now empty of cars but full of horses. We hear people speculating on what might happen in the next Sherlock Holmes installment. Our hero goes to see a play called Ulysses – not the ‘scandalous’ book by James Joyce, but a conventional stage play featuring Olympian gods.

He fights a duel with a German officer; the torturous protocols and outdated procedures boggle the mind.

Over the rest of the film we see how the world radically changes over 40 years, and how ‘Blimp’ does not. But now, his unchanging nature is shown in a more positive light: instead, he is seen to be utterly faithful, unbreakably loyal, a man who unquestioningly stands surety for a friend with everything he owns. Someone who falls in love once, and, come what may, can never fall in love with another woman. His wife begs him to never change, ‘not till the floods come’, and he never does.

But of course, he had to change. Britain in 1943 was fighting for its very existence. The Blimps had to go. The triumph of the film is how it turns that truth into a heartbreaking tragedy: there was no more room in the world for certainties, honour, decency or trust.

The makers of this film, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger went on to create many truly brilliant films; and that’s not just my view, Martin Scorsese agrees. David Mamet calls this it his favourite film, and considers the duel scene ‘perfection’. It is emotional, romantic, thought provoking, and has a career defining performance from Roger Livesey at its heart. I have watched it many times, and keep finding new things to love.

In case you haven’t noticed, there has been a big hullabaloo brewing in the last few days in the British media concerning twitter. A few days ago they were excitedly reporting on how trending topics on twitter were forcing traditional media organisations to back down and apologise for offensive articles. Today, the big focus is on Stephen Fry, whose little spat with another user (who has been on the receiving end of some ignorant abuse since) has provoked much chin stroking about whether twitter is ‘finished’

To my mind, the way in which twitter has been presented to the public via the traditional media is wrong. (Nothing new here: if you go back to 1993, the world wide web was sold to newspaper readers as a geeks paradise, of no possible use to normal people.) Twitter was described as a great way to follow what your favourite celebrities were up to. And its biggest problem was when ordinary people tweeted boring things about breakfast, which no-one wanted to know about, and which displayed a startling narcissism on the part of the ordinary person.

To my mind, the problem twitter has, at least with the way it is perceived, is the other way around.

Firstly, ‘boring, irrelevant’ tweets are only as meaningless as their intended audience thinks they are. If a friend tweets ‘Just had a great cup of coffee’, I don’t find that boring. Its exactly the kind of thing people say to each other. If it was said in a restaurant, would it be appropriate for someone at an adjoining table to loudly claim it was a boring and irrelevant remark? People have conversations in public: deal with it. If you find eavesdropping boring, stop listening.

The more close a relationship, the more boring and irrelevant the conversations will seem to an outsider, but if we only spoke to our friends about ‘important’ matters, we wouldn’t have many friends.

Secondly, the tendency to see twitter as a means of getting close to celebrities is like saying that computer screens are a great way of illuminating a room. Partially true, but understates the potential rather.

I used to follow some celebrities, but quickly found that doing so inhibited my tweeting. I didn’t find Stephen Fry boring, but I felt ridiculous tweeting about my thoughts when such a celebrated wit was tweeting a few lines above me. But, to my friends, my tweets were just as relevant. And I enjoyed the democratising effect of twitter: all tweets are equal.

The potential of twitter is that we can all say what we think. But if we don’t think – and instead, just get told what to think – then twitter turns into a great way to mobilise mobs. And the fault is not with Stephen Fry – we are all allowed to snap at people from time to time – but with us. Its looking a bit like that scene in The Life of Brian, when he begs us to realise that we are all individuals. “Yes, we are all individuals” we chant back.