I have no special personal knowledge of the man known as Old Holborn to social media users across the world and who has recently very sadly passed away. I didn’t meet him, was not close to him and I don’t think I interacted with him online. However, his voice was one that I eagerly and regularly sought out. Even when I was banned from Twitter for wrongspeak I went back to Twitter as a non logged in reader primarily to see what Old Holborn was up to with his 37^th, I believe, Twitter account something that is testimony to how he managed to get all the right targets pissed off and how many times the ‘offended’ got his accounts banned.

Every morning at 5am when I got up to write, Old Holborn’s Twitter account was the first thing I turned to when I was drinking my first coffee of the day. I really wanted to see what he’d said and which perma-offended poltroons he had upset. Old Holborn ran his account(s) in such a way that there was always something to get my attention or make me laugh or to see some of the extreme idiocies in society and in government. Even when he was making points that I didn’t agree with or which caused me a sharp intake of breath because I knew that Old Holborn had, in the words of HL Mencken, just enthusiastically ‘thrown a dead cat into a sanctuary’, I applauded him. In fact so consistent were Old Holborn’s critiques of everyone from race grifters and political ideologues to anti-vaxxers and statists that it could be said that Old Holborn appeared to employ a conveyor belt in order to deliver thousands of dead cats to equally numerous and varied sanctuaries. Old Holborn had, as far as I could see, a policy of offending everyone, including whole cities like Liverpool.

I didn’t get the impression that Old Holborn was a sort of ‘joining person’, the sort of individual that would join political movements, he spoke his mind about the world as he saw it and not through the distorted lens of any particular ideology. In that way he somewhat reminded me of Treebeard the Ent in Lord of the Rings. Treebeard said that he wasn’t on any particular ‘side’ when it came to Saruman the bent wizard, as ‘nobody is really on my side’. Old Holborn was on his own side and was not afraid to talk about it. Not for him was the idea of ploughing someone else’s furrow, instead he ploughed his own.

Whilst his passing will be most acutely felt by his bereaved family, there will be many others for whom the death of Old Holborn will be a blow. It will be a blow to those who were inspired by Old Holborn’s actions to speak up about the things that concern them and put their concerns up for open debate. Old Holborn once said I believe that ‘anyone can be Old Holborn’ if they desire to, all it takes is to say what’s on their minds and to voice their opinions, especially, as it was on many occasions, if those opinions challenged the actions of governments and ideologies. The world will miss Old Holborn.

May his memory be for a blessing (although he’d probably laugh at me for saying that)

Addendum:

There is an excellent interview with Old Holborn from May 2013 that’s still up over on The Backbencher website.