The idea that any of these Good Place GIFs, Chomsky quotes or cuntbombs might make the blindest difference to the firstborn of a fearsome pub baron is perhaps the biggest joke of all. At best it’s a bad habit and it reveals a real predictability at the heart of the response the same digs, quotes, memes, even jokes repeated over and over again in the vague hope that they might land. However, I think it’s also quite dishonest and deluded to suggest that the practice of jumping on people like this is healthy or helpful anymore. Some, I can only assume, wanted me to be a millionaire’s son more than they wanted to think about it properly.Ī lot of people were quite gracious when they found out the joke, but others accused me of “looking for attention” and implying that people should have known who I was – as if pretending to be Tim Martin’s son was all some big ego trip as opposed to a silly joke that borders on self-sabotage. There was always going to be a few suckers, but what I didn’t account for was people with profiles, people who've written books, people with followers and accountability, people who really should know better (including some who very much know who I am) trying to put my head on a pole. But the furied, instantaneous nature of Twitter and the scramble for another Hetty Douglas moment meant this had no chance of happening. I hoped the idea of a media-savvy heir to a beer fortune flipping out about being called “curry club” and “guest ale” might be slightly too ludicrous to believe. I was aware of the grim believability that I could, in fact, be Tim Martin's son, but I tried to load it with enough hints, ridiculous language and retweets of people who clearly were “in” on the joke that I expected it to stay in not-quite-real territory. The reaction to my tweet didn't exactly leave me thrilled about where we're all going on that berserk message board. In what seemed to be wild personal history lessons, people were laying out their entire lives up until that point: the school they went to, the house they grew up in, their parents’ jobs, their parents’ parent’s jobs, to try and make a point. I found that people were going in deep not just on me, or Tim Martin and his fake son, but on themselves. It’s one thing calling Tim Martin’s son a wanker on the internet, but another to lay out your entire life story in the context of the British class system to a load of semi-anonymous AVIs on a social media site. The extreme seriousness that some people were engaging in started to bring up a few feelings of guilt that I didn’t count on. It was as if the entire scope of early 21st century unease was laid out in my mentions – a quite incredible sight to behold. There were GIFs, Photoshop mock-ups, rage comics, petty insults, personal attacks, “do you get free pints” jokes, a misinformed defence from MeToo’d journo Rupert Myers and at least one interview inquiry from a major publication, all of whom believed my dad was actually Tim Martin. I was informed of structural inequality, inherited wealth, tax avoidance, Brexit, COVID-19 – the whole gamut of Johnson-era dread. I was told to educate myself, to examine my privilege, to take a long hard look at myself.
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