WHAT a week. It had more bumps than the dodgems and more stomach-churning surprises than a defective rollercoaster. It was the week of remembrance – but precious few signs of peaceful reflection were on show.

Poppy ideologues stalked my timeline like tired demagogues, shouting down anyone who dared to remember the dead with unstated dignity, especially those who exercised their right to go through life with a quiet lapel. As Wilfred Owens once said so eloquently – “Oh fuck, not November again?”

Beyond the danse macabre of poppy week was another concoction in the toxic chemistry of Scottish football. Spare change was thrown with incoherent venom at two successive matches, unleashing five days of claim and counterclaim. Scottish football loves to moralise from a position bereft of legitimacy. It is painful to read some of the tortured logic that fans resort to as they defend the indefensible.

Then there was a brief bright light of progress. For half-a-day and not much more, I was allowed to bask in the reflected glory of Glasgow winning the silver medal in Channel 4’s much publicised devolution of resources across the UK: 50 jobs, the first UK commissioning base outside London and network budgets to match.

But before the skies lit up, another explosion arched up over my life, this time Channel 4’s messy casting of what was intended as an on-air review of Brexit.

So for days my Twitter account was an open wound, opinion crawling over it like tsetse flies. The debate was robust – or to be less polite it was accusatory, and demanding answers to an issue I knew next to nothing about and was powerless to reverse.

For a brief depressing moment I thought of abandoning Twitter, but how could I desert Miss Moppet, Vintage Wullie and the Heavenly Dancers? What have they done other than make me smile, reflect on past eras and marvel at the sheer beauty of Scotland and its defiant landscape?

For all the toxic sewage that seeps through the pipes of Twitter there are moments of sheer wonder that I have come to realise I cannot do without.

Most of them come from photographic accounts – stunning and dramatic images that invite you to think rather than demand you answer.

Let me introduce you to three of my reliable friends. @poppymoppet is someone I have never met and such are the deceptions of social media she could be a 25-stone lorry driver from Carnoustie for all I know, but I somehow doubt that.

Miss Moppet posts images from the 1960s, the high-point of modern pop culture, and so her timeline focuses on pop-art, mod ephemera and Carnaby Street cool.

It appeals directly to my interest in the decade, but beneath the rescued imagery of the Beatles, The Stones and Manfred Mann is a subtle feminism that would be worthy of seminar at Glasgow Women’s Library – this week she posted a remarkable gallery of photographs of air hostesses from the 1960s, from the era when flying was glamorous and outwith the price range of ordinary Scots.

On the surface Miss Moppet circulates images about fashion and fantasy which display an artistry that might have come from Robert Rauschenberg or Robert Motherwell.

I love following this woman’s photographs. You not only learn about the past, but enter a world that has been stripped of corrosive nostalgia. It is a masterclass in how to curate, with none of the bitter and argumentative sniping that Twitter has become synonymous with.

Having to put up with reams of uncaring rubbish over the last week, it was a joy looking at old images of air hostesses without the fear of being entrapped in accusations of voyeurism or rampant scopophilia.

They are photographs. She hangs them like a gallery and invites us to reflect on what modernity and its ephemera means. That is a rare but positive role that Twitter can play in our lives.

I have a closer grasp of Vintage Wullie – I suspect he is male and probably resides somewhere in the Angus region of Scotland, although I cannot be certain. He describes himself as a “black-jawed living-room couch professor”, but otherwise offers only fragmentary clues to his real identity.

Like Miss Moppet, Wullie’s passion is posting photographs from the past – but they could not be more different in tone and intention.

Vintage Wullie is something of a social historian. His images, mostly in black and white, look back to a Scotland of a darker and more industrial yesteryear: a young girl nestling a baby in a tartan shawl in the Gorbals in the 1930s; Fisherman, Harvey Fairbairn of Cockburnspath, Berwickshire, with crab and lobster pots 1947; and an undated image of a window cleaner in Hope Street, Glasgow, perilously standing on a chair on a sixth-floor window ledge.

These images of Scotland are a stark reminder of how the lifestyles of Scotland’s working class has changed, how many jobs have simply disappeared and how utterly bleak so much of industrial Scotland actually was in days gone by.

But rather than leave it there, Vintage Wullie has a trick up his sleeve, one he plays every Friday when he turns his attention to children at play.

Under the recurring catchphrase “Let’s knock Friday right out the park“, Wullie posts images of Scotland’s children playing in deprived communities: it is a wonderful idea, featuring all the joyous and anti-authoritarian mischief of being a kid in the days before Playstations existed.

Last, but by no means least, is Picture This Scotland, who goes by the handle @74frankfurt, a clue to the fact that he may too be a Scotland football fan who cherishes fond memories of our unbeaten World Cup journey in Germany in 1974.

One of his galleries is deliberately and compellingly mundane – it is called “Random Street Scenes“ and it is a series of streets in Scotland which show change and progress in all its forms.

Curiously, it is the opposite of nostalgia. The point of the photographs is to illustrate the sometimes invisible everyday that surrounds us without provoking comment, until it’s gone. His recent gallery

includes The Cross in Kilmarnock, Salters Road in Wallyford and undistinguished council flats in Granton. A similar gallery on Scotland’s bus routes has the same sense of mundaneness made fascinating.

I pay homage to these three contributors. They have unknowingly lifted my spirits in a week of bleak online life, where the caustic and mordant debate about poppies, remembrance and football tribalism made me despair that agreement could ever be struck.

Whenever social media gets me down, I return like a needy lap-dog to hash-tag northern lights the stream of imagery that captures the Aurora Borealis, Scotland’s colourful solar wonder, in ways that kindle neon imagery by J D Fergusson after a handful of ekkies.

It is a joy to escape even inside yourself. So for those of you who pestered me for details of St Johnstone manager Tommy Wright’s religious background, or worse still, my opinion of a Stoke City footballer who I’ve never seen in the flesh, my apologies I was too busy looking at old photographs of Mary Quant.

Don’t ask me next year either, Miss Poppett has a gallery of customised scooters yet to be seen online, so I won’t be listening.

The final book in Stuart Cosgrove’s Soul Trilogy, ‘Harlem 69: the Future of Soul’, is published by Polygon.