1862: Before the advent of the Internet (invented in 1893, in its original form The Internet was a large room in central London with a dictionary, an encyclopaedia, a cat in a box and thousands of drawings and photographs of ladies’ vaginas in it) people afflicted with “The Twitters” would compulsively write down every thought that popped into their head, each one on a separate piece of paper which their carers would throw away in the mistaken belief that nobody would want to read them. Here Agnes Williams is writing “Agnes likes sunshine” because she did.