Twitter is an odd place, especially if you keep your account open instead of private. It gives you access to conversations between complete strangers, brought to your attention by people you do follow bringing the chat into your view, or through the triple perils: the flame spurts of the search box, the quicksand hashtags, or the trending topics of unusual size.
A lot of the time, as anyone will warn you, this leaves you open to trolls and hate-mongers and bullies and all kinds of weird and upsetting opinions, statements, links, arguments, pictures, et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum. You can stumble across it easily, people can stumble across you, and it can get unpleasant very easily.
And then you have the other side of it. I've seen people use Twitter for all sorts of good or just mundane things, from organising the next cinema trip to rehoming pets to fundraising for charity to finding missing belongings, animals, people...
Sometimes the random disconnected strangers turn out to be kind and generous. They make the effort to do better than just scraping by at the passive level of "Don't be a dick". They go one step further and actively do something nice.
I'm fortunate enough that most of the people I keep on my Twitter feed are like that. And it's helpful and reassuring to have friends who will step up and offer comfort and cheering-up and what help they can manage when things go pear-shaped, as they so often seem to.
What's surprising is when strangers do it too.
I can only assume that Joanne Harris was searching for mentions of The Gospel of Loki to see what people were saying, and stumbled across me citing it as the only positive thing in two days of squabbles and hurt and a rapid stacking up of bad, dark, unhappy things. She could easily have moved on to the next tweet with all squee and happy reviews.
Instead she paused, and took a moment to send a message, and be nice to a stranger. For no reason other than she could.
I ate today because of that. Because the kindness of friends is expected, and the kindness of strangers is surprising.
Gospel of Loki review tomorrow, perhaps. I kind of owe her now.
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