Thursday, 29th. January 2026

I cannot really explain why but I feel slightly down this morning. I should feel buoyed up after my trip to Totnes yesterday and meeting amicable people in the church and catching up with an old friend afterwards. For half of the day I was with positive, kind and thoughtful people, but later I spoilt it all by paying a visit to a pub local to me, where the atmosphere was clouded with negativity and bigotry.

In recent months I have learned that we appear to live in two different worlds. In one there are people whose prejudices make it easy for them to believe all the misinformation and downright false information out there, and which seems designed to create hatred, rage and division. In the other are people who treat others as individuals and with respect, and who make their own minds up based on knowledge, agreeing or disagreeing amicably.

I have a friend who is in the first camp, and who utterly believes that he is right and “everyone else agrees with me”. That is because he moves almost entirely only in the world where such people exist. He constantly bleats lies to me whenever we meet, lies which I know are sourced largely from malicious social media posts. He seems oblivious to the harm he is causing me. If I deign to mention this to him he angrily retorts that he “does not use social Media”. I don’t challenge this. If I did, the obvious response would be that you don’t have to get lies from social media directly, but from people down the pub who do.

I was engulfed in that world for quite some time, and became depressed as a result. I have since learned that the real world still exists, complete with kindness, positivity and thinking. I am attempting to spend more time in that world. But not all of my time. Is it possible to bring the two worlds together, at least in part?