I sit in a tent at a Summer festival. It is, naturally, cold and wet and each tap of the keyboard is echoed by the thump of dampened, wind-blown canvas. Astonishingly, at the bottom of my screen, three of four little rectangles are glowing yellow, telling me that here, in this field in the middle of nowhere, there is (albeit splutteringly feeble) a wi-fi hotspot. OK, warmspot. A slight thrill runs through by chilled, unwashed body as I realise that I may be able to post this week's weblog after all.

You see, I'd determined that I wouldn't let a small thing like a twelve day holiday away from home stop me from keeping faith with my loyal reader and so I'd confidently packed my little netbook in the expectation that somewhere there would be a hotspot that I could hitch a ride on in order to post in time for my self-imposed deadline. Only a cynical fool allows experience to override that ever-present hope.  And worse:  I'd never experienced Cornwall.

An entire life spent on the same little island in the northern seas and I had not got around to visiting what turns out to be an area of natural beauty and spectacle second only, in my view, to the Swiss Alps (and, yes, I have visited the Grand Canyon: twice), right here on my own doorstep. I guess the people of Cornwall are heartily sick of being told how beautiful their county is, particularly since that especial curse ensures that there is absolutely no industry and therefore no work that would allow most of them the resources and opportunity to go out and enjoy it as the rest of us are able to. The denizens of Cornwall are, for the most part, employed in ensuring that we who can afford it, have a nice time. Once we leave and the storms arrive, they... probably sleep or something... I don't know. Nor do most people care, so long as they awaken in time to welcome them back next year.

But, I (as the more interesting writers used to do) digress. Well, not a great deal, for one of the concomitants of a lack of industrial and commercial infrastructure is that there is very little or, let's be honest, no wi-fi to speak of in much of Cornwall. I'd come across one in Lizard, a tiny village on a weather-beaten peninsular that boasts the most southerly... well, everything actually. Lighthouse; Post Office; phone box; toilet; pub; and it was in the most southerly-but-one of these that I got a strong enough signal to enable my wife to book a B&B for the next leg of our little foray but alas, allowed me no time to compose a piece that would be worthy of my loyal reader.

And so it continued. Whenever I had the opportunity, I never had the wi-fi.

Of course, by now you will be muttering that I could perfectly well have written the thing and held it until such time as I got a good enough signal to assign it to the server. (I often wonder where my website actually is – I assume a clinical and environmentally-controlled temple to the written word, somewhere in Silicon Valley but, more likely, some cobwebbed dungeon in the back-streets of Mumbai).

Again, I digress. Of course I do; because, in spite of my three little yellow rectangles, there is little chance of my being able to fling this missive off into the ether until I return home for, having tested the connection, I receive only a terse statement to the effect that this particular hotspot (cooling as I write) is for contributors and performers only. The likes of me will have to wait until we get back to civilisation. Perhaps I'll read a book instead. Now, where did I put my Kindle?

So many words already written on the subject of the UK riots.  Four that interest me in the main are; loot, thug, hooligan, and …cobra.

"Loot" is Hindi in origin and enters English through the early days of the Raj, of course and refers specifically to stolen property.  Its first attested use as a verb dates from the mid 19th century. 

"Thug", likewise, is from the Hindi and also entered common usage in the early 19th century when the activities of the sect commonly (but mistakenly) called “thugees” became the stuff of unpleasant tales from the Raj.

"Hooligan", of course, is said to be based on the Irish family name, “Houlihan” becoming widely used, again in the 19th century as a synonym for “lout”.

Now, what strikes me about these words, used with abandon in most news articles on the subject of rioting, is how racially pejorative they all are.  It may be coincidence, of course but surely, there are good, solid, Norse or Saxon or even Norman words for the anti-social?

How about “ruffian”?  No, sorry, it’s Italian.   “Hoodlum”? Old German, apparently, meaning someone who covers their head, presumably to avoid identification.  It had connotations of villainy (see below) from early times.  It went straight to America, bypassing England.  We’re on safer ground with “villain” – Old French meaning “country labourer” – a profession which obviously had unsavoury connotations amongst the aristocracy (who, after all, owned the language). However, nowadays a “villain” is rather a tabloid term of endearment for crooks and scallywags of all kinds.  “Crook” is old Norse and “scallywag”? …well, you tell me.

No, the more unlike ourselves these people are, the better we like it and, racist or no, these are the words we will use.

We have a new word, though – “hoodie”.  A catch-all word describing any young person who wears what we used to call a tracksuit top that has a hood on it.  It has convenient etymological connections with “hood”, meaning “unsavoury character” (cf. hoodlum). 

Oh, almost forgot.  “Cobra”.  In the context of public order, it refers to the British Government’s crisis response committee, which meets in one of the Cabinet Office Briefing Rooms (C.O.B.R.). Fortuitously, this sounds enough like “Cobra” for the media to jump on it; strike-force – cobra.  Geddit?  Government spin doctors liked this and so, they arranged for the meetings of this response committee to always meet in  Cabinet Office Briefing Room “A”, thus completing the macho acronym to everyone’s satisfaction.  David Cameron appears particularly fond of referring to his “…meetings of COBRA…” and his “…agreements at COBRA…”

To my ears, it sounds like it comes straight out of “Team America” but to many, it must be marvellous to hear that our response to the “thugs” hooligans” and “looters” is… COBRA.  That’ll teach ‘em.

It might interest the spin doctors to know that the word “cobra” derives from a Portuguese term meaning, “to wear a hood”.

It’s one of the saws of the modern age: that it is perfectly possible for anyone to be whomsoever they wish to be online.  The anonymity afforded by the internet has been, paradoxically, in part responsible for the extraordinary rise in social networking. Questions that are perfectly acceptable at most social gatherings – “…so what do you do?”  “…do you have children?” are generally felt to be inappropriate in an online “conversation” and, in a strange way, both parties seem to benefit from this novel propriety.  When we converse (it really should be “correspond”) online, we needs must make assumptions about the other parties involved which can, of course, lead to all kinds of issues from harmless flirting to out-and-out grooming.

Each party has to be complicit in the other’s fantasy life and they must choose to accept one another at their word.  No doubt, many of us are cynical enough to believe that much of what is offered in online conversations is, to put it politely, less than honest but as I say, that is a part of the contract into which we all enter once we don our cyberspacesuits and float off into the craposphere.

Several recent threads on the online writer’s website forum, Authonomy, have left a rather nasty taste.  The kind of abuse one might expect to hear in a Glasgow pub on a Celtic – Rangers match day has been slung about in spades and over what?   Writing; that’s what.  Now we’ve all read about how artistic rivalry can sometimes spill over into something more unpleasant but it’s hard to imagine William Makepeace Thackeray telling Charlotte Bronte to go fuck herself with a rusty spike and even Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald - both perfectly able to - didn't plumb such depths.

But to equal the quantity of bile generated over on Authonomy between largely unpublished and equally largely untalented individuals would require a liver the size of Lewisham.  But none of these people really know one another.  Each is battling mere simulacra – almost genuine avatars of very real people and about whom either party knows...well, nothing.   

I can't even summon up that level of animosity for the government front bench.  These people must have access to an almost limitless supply of anger;  a venom field; their very own vitriol reserves upon which they can draw at any time, to fling over and drench anyone who offers the merest slight. 

At least, I suppose, those of us who are mere(?) spectators can savour the delicious irony of witnessing arguments grow and flourish as a result of writers being utterly unable to express themselves using the written word – unless, of course, that word contains no more than four  letters - but perhaps, in the end, the anger is just as phony as everything else online.  

Let's hope so.