My YouTube rabbit hole

How do you live with yourself when 179 air passengers are burned alive on a South Korean runway, and you’ve spent the last few weeks binge-watching YouTube videos about plane crashes? The obvious answer is that I need to seek help. I have a defence, but I don’t think any British jury would buy it. I started watching the air-crash videos to escape the anxiety caused by the American presidential election. Anxiety that Donald Trump might lose, that is.

On YouTube there’s always someone listening. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for monomaniacs

I can imagine Emily Maitlis and Rory Stewart’s reaction: ‘Self-declared Trump supporter chills out by imagining planes full of holidaymakers falling out of the sky. That figures.’ But I don’t care what they think. Their horror-struck faces were one of the joys of election night. Not that I saw it live – I was so freaked out by the prospect of a Kamala Harris victory that I handed over my SIM card and router to a friend to avoid the agony of watching it unfold. I know this sounds completely loopy, but I blame YouTube – the crystal meth of online entertainment for people like me who can’t let go of their pet topics.

My childhood was dominated by a smorgasbord of obsessions: Sherlock Holmes, Doctor Who, coin-collecting and Beethoven. Even today, my old schoolmates shudder at the memory of my playground lectures. Did they know the George III 1787 sixpence came in two varieties, with and without a semée of hearts? Or that Beethoven wrote alternative finales to his string quartet Opus 130? Or that…

Like the unseen flower in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy’, I was wasting my sweetness on the desert air. But on YouTube there’s always someone listening. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for monomaniacs.