Even the casual birthday greeting from someone I didn’t really know meant something. That tiny effort to respond to a prompt from an algorithm made to create data-for-sale punches through the discomfiting medium and strikes at something worthwhile within. I hear the shouldered voices: they don’t even know you, what’s the point?, they’re only making themselves feel/look good, and am momentarily cowed, and I look again. Indeed: Happy Birthday mate. The ones who called me mate aren’t ‘mates’. Not sure they ever were. But they use the word. Choose it (however) casually. Because it’s matey.

And that can surely be no bad thing?

The cards on my mantelpiece are fewer, but are they the more sincere for being in(k)scribed and en-veloped? Even a small effort is an effort. It’s the thought that counts, when you know, however you know, that the thought’s been thought.

(So thank you, thinkers