"You're on mute, mate"

Have you tried asking the news to knock before entering?

(Credit: Live and Let’s Fly)

It was only week three of lockdown when it stopped being amusing. Not the novelty of cancelled plans or the government-sanctioned daily walk, but the colleagues on Zoom who would begin speaking while still on mute. Invariably, the poor soul running the meeting would patiently interject, “Gareth, you’re on mute.” Worse, this always seemed to elicit widespread laughter, a display of collective madness eclipsed only by the performative clapping on BBC Question Time.

Several years and doses of Pfizer-BioNTech vaccines later, muting has become a vital tool in my social media arsenal. I don’t mean muting people — though I do that frequently — but certain words and phrases I’d rather not see. These can range from calls for the death of me and my family to TV shows that I simply find tedious.

This occasionally leads to some confusion. For example, has a particular post on my Bluesky timeline been muted because it is celebrating violence against me, or just moaning about something Jonathan Ross has done on Celebrity Traitors? Frankly, I can die not knowing. Or I can click unmute and instantly regret it.

To be clear, my aim is not to avoid the news entirely, be blind to painful topics or ignore all those with whom I disagree. Only to do these things on my terms. That is, when I’m in the right mental state. Put another way, I try to turn the news into an invited guest, not one who barges in unannounced, demanding attention and a hot dinner.