Ask Shrimsley: Should I ‘qwit’ Twitter? Whatever you do, make sure it’s all about you
Yes indeed. I see it is time for your 10th annual “I’m quitting Twitter” moment. (Already, the FT’s senior editors are limbering up to inform me that house style requires us to refer to the site as X.com, or X, as per its new name, but that simply doesn’t work as a statement of intent. If I tell you that I am quitting X, you will just assume that I haven’t quite decided what to quit yet and will simply be filling in the X at a later moment.)
Furthermore, no one who is about to qwit calls it X. If you do, then you are probably still happy with the place and would not be leaving. So it is Twitter we are leaving, although, of course, if you were foolish enough to ask why, we would tell you that, actually, Twitter left us some time ago. Incidentally, don’t under any circumstances ask anyone why they are leaving Twitter, because they’ll tell you, and it won’t be in fewer than 140 characters. In any case, you don’t need to ask, because they are going to tell you whether you do or not.
But the question is: is it finally time to quit? Elon Muskhas given us a few more reasons to go. He’s let Donald Trump and Tommy Robinson back in, says civil war is inevitable in the UK and was jolly rude about Sir Keir Starmer.
So by all means quit, but let’s be clear: you can’t just leave. You have to proclaim your departure, probably at great length, explaining how it was once the greatest party on Earth, but now it is full of nasty rightwing riffraff or furious leftwing riffraff or riffraff with no discernible political views, but who are still furious and nasty in some other way.
The good news is that you could do it on Twitter. “Oyez, oyez, oyez (isn’t that the new congestion charge?), on the 24th day of August, the honourable whoever you are, boasting 25,000 followers, at least 4,000 of whom are not bots, has decided to quit this sphere. He/she will slink back some time in September.”
But you are simply not allowed to go without the long, heartfelt goodbye. The last post needs to talk about how much you loved the place, the good friends you made, the gossip, how central it was to your life . . . but that now it is even more awful than it was when you chose not to notice all the racism, misogyny and insane bullying. You cannot just slope away quietly. You must declaim.
There are many excellent models of the last letter before you leave Twitter, but can I recommend my own version from 2011, or perhaps the one from 2015 (or was it 2017?), though the last one at least recognised that I would probably give in and return before too long. It is not enough simply to tell your followers where to find you in future, so just forget for a moment that you are not Taylor Swift and that no one cares what social media you use and that we all think you will be back. Put your whole heart into it. It’s time for your “I had a dream” post.
I did toy with departing again when Musk took over. Several of my Twitter pals (I know I should call them X pals but that might imply we have fallen out) announced they were off to a site called Mastodon. I did take a look and reserved a Mastodon name but it was immediately obvious that the site was rubbish, unnecessarily nerdy and would never take off in the way Twitter had. I then looked at Facebook Threads and reserved a name but it was immediately obvious that the site was rubbish, insufficiently nerdy and would never take off in the way Twitter had. Nowadays, there is Blue Sky, which is full of people I agree with but much smaller, less informative and mostly very polite, and where’s the fun in that?
Anyway, what could be better than watching fanatical idiots enraging each other and knowing that you don’t care who loses. This is the digital equivalent of bear-baiting except without sympathy for the bear.
It’s true that X’s bonehead-per-capita ratio is depressingly high but then that’s true of a lot of places these days. Have you ever watched Love Island? X is now a cesspool of racism, misogyny and rage but, again, there have to be some alternatives to the Daily Mail.
So look, go if you want but be sure to make a meal of your departure. Draw it out, or in other words, Elongate it.
Email Robert at magazineletters@ft.com
In 2025, the Czech conductor Jakub Hrůša starts work at Covent Garden as music director of the Royal Opera. He is already known in the UK, conducting at Glyndebourne, Covent Garden and the Philharmonia, but the two Proms filled with Czech music which he and the Czech Philharmonic gave this week demonstrated the context from which he comes.
Certainly in his hands the Czech Philharmonic is one of the world’s superlative orchestras. Throughout these pieces — Dvořák’s cello concerto and Suk’s second symphony in Prom 49, Dvořák’s piano concerto and Janáček’s Glagolitic Mass in Prom 50 — it showed distinctly melodious and sensuous qualities all its own, ranging from the harsh to the sweet. It was often at its most spellbinding in quiet music; the high strings created lingering magic.
The orchestra excelled in judging special sound alchemies: a brief blend of harp and trombone in the piano concerto created a poetic frisson, while the spacious Modernist opening fanfare for brass and drums in the Glagolitic Mass spoke arrestingly of history and the universal. The overall Philharmonic sound often seemed to derive colour from the blends of its wind playing.
Hrůša’s conducting was invariably energetic, without flamboyance. Even in the slowest passages, there was a propulsive quality. There seemed no ego in his direction: he was just fully engaged.
Anastasia Kobekina was Tuesday’s captivating soloist in the cello concerto. She shaped Dvořák’s melodic lines with a wide variety of vibrato and portamento; her manner alternated engagingly between the private and the public, drawing us in and giving herself out. Mao Fujita played the taxing piano part in the piano concerto in an entirely private manner. Much of Dvořák’s piano writing is gorgeously wound into the orchestral texture: Fujita was enchanting in many quiet passages. Even the most brilliant sections had a reflective tone.
Corinne Winters (soprano), Bella Adamova (mezzo), David Butt Philip (tenor) and Pavel Švingr (bass) joined the Prague Philharmonic Choir for the Glagolitic Mass, the heroic oratorio in which the pan-Slavist, pantheist, agnostic Janáček turned to Old Church Slavonic and the Glagolitic alphabet. (The only technical flaw of these concerts was that the choir, placed behind the orchestra, did not project entirely clearly, though I confess my command of Glagolitic is deficient.)
Like so much of this composer’s work, his vocal writing is often challenging in the extreme: he asks soloists and chorus to enter vocal lines on exposed high notes, with attack. The effect is often strange — but the element of strain becomes rewardingly eloquent, tying into Janácek’s larger lyricism.
These concerts’ two least known works were Suk’s second symphony (“Asrael”), an imaginative five-movement work that powerfully took the soul on a large metaphysical journey, and Vítězslava Kaprálová’s Military Sinfoniettain Prom 50. Ours is an era when the women composers of both past and present are newly honoured, but Kaprálová (1915-40) achieved much in her own short life, even conducting this sinfonietta at the Queen’s Hall, London, in 1938. It is a confident, impressive, versatile work, military but never martial.
The richness of these two concerts makes you want to immerse yourself in more Czech music for months