Ok, my intention was to do one of these a week, but just for today, and as it was Boo that asked…
Giraffes are really social beasts,
They’d go to barbecues and feasts.
They’d like to dance the night away,
Attend an opera or play.
And yet they never take the chance
– You’ll never meet one at a dance –
And if you want to know just why,
The boys look stupid in a tie.
(The girls, as well, don’t find it easy,
Can’t find a skirt to reach their kneesy.)
Hope that’s ok Boo.
Oh tell me lowly little flea*
Why did you have to pick on me?
Long, long ago, when I was younger and much more nimble of mind, I had a party trick in which I asked people to give me an animal and I would immediately give them a short comic verse about said beast. (Doesn’t sound much, does it, but I could not sing, I could not juggle and the only thing I ever pulled out of a hat was my head.) During the course of this game, people would start to name ever more exotic animals in the hope of tripping me up, but as long as I knew what they were, that was actually ok. What would have defeated me was if they had all given me the same animal. (Try making up, for instance, ten different verses about a cat. I know T. S. Eliot did a book full, but he had ages and he wasn’t drunk at the time.) Anyway, I thought that I’d test myself: could I still do it? Well, in a word, no – everything takes a little longer these days – but I can still produce a little nonsense rhyme if you give me a couple of minutes. I like animals, so I thought I might give you a zoo on a ‘blank’ day for a little while – although like all things zoological, it will almost certainly evolve into something else along the way. I’m not sure how long it will maintain my interest. It might be a very small zoo, a zoo-ette perhaps, we’ll just have to see how it goes.
I won’t go for alphabetical order (although I am starting – below – with a double A), because I’m bound to think of something else after the letter has gone, so they will appear more or less as they occur to me. They will usually be very short, way below tea and biscuit length, so don’t expect a huge diversion. I have written about a dozen today, so we have a week or two in the bag, although I will, without doubt, have lost faith in many of them and hit ‘DELETE’ long before they get published. They are all strangely, childishly, innocent, but currently, I rather like them for that…
AARDVARK
Aardvark have such funny noses,
Look like hairy, wrinkled hoses.
Why they have them, goodness knowses,
They must need them, I supposes.
*Not strictly an animal, I know, nor strictly a verse. I feel that it is probably a stretch to even call it a couplet, but it makes me smile and, let’s face it, the zoo must be full of them. For years I have had this in my files, convinced that it was written by somebody else, but I have searched and searched, and it was not. It is a small thing, but all my own…
I wear contact lenses, largely due to the nature of my work. They are, at times, a total pain, but they do come along with a number of distinct advantages over glasses. They mean that I can hold my head up in society at large: when it rains, I can walk without staring down at my feet in order to keep the rain off my spectacle lenses. I can enter a building without steaming up. I can play sport; I can play with my grandkids without having to constantly reach for the superglue. When I emerge from the horror of the Public Swimming Baths changing rooms, I can see more than a Technicolor swirl of unidentified flesh and ill-advised costume. I do not need my family to come and find me and lead me, like some grotesque bespectacled walrus, towards the chlorine/urine cocktail of the pool. I even swim in my contacts. I know that I shouldn’t, but it does mean that I do not spend my whole time in the water apologising for swimming into people.
Lenses are not without drawbacks: especially after a long night, when I can’t get them in, or after a long day, when I can’t get them out, but the modern soft toric lenses do not come close to the tiny slivers of glass I used to insert into my eyes in days of yore. Each pair lasted a year, so losing one on the bus was a nightmare – but not as much as losing one in your own eye. The increasingly desperate attempts to locate, and subsequently extract, the errant lens often left one eye looking like, as my friend described it, a bulldog’s bollock (or bullock as my spellcheck is desperate to persuade me). From that I could only assume that he had some intimate knowledge of the aforementioned canine’s testes, and that they were, indeed, red, swollen and angry-looking. I never asked. Stray over your maximum twelve hours of wear in those miniscule head-lamps and you felt like someone had sandpapered your eyeball. Whatever vision remained was shrouded in the kind of fog that would have stopped the London buses.
I have spent my whole life battling with the right/left conundrum: never quite certain of which is which. Consequently, my morning contact lens routine can be a little fraught. For a start, my lenses may not be in the correct sides of the case from the evening before. If they are, they may not go into the correct eye in the morning. (One of the rare occasions where two wrongs really do make a right.) For thirty years or more I have tried to help myself by singing my own version of the bloody awful ‘(B)right eye(s)’every time I remove/insert what just might, possibly, be the right contact lens. It serves no-one – least of all Art Garfunkel – well.
These days, as my vision, like my common sense, fades into oblivion, I wear varifocal glasses when I do not have lenses in. These little miracles mean that I can see the world in general with a certain clarity whilst still being able to read books, signs and mobile phones, without having to have a second pair of specs suspended around my neck on a spangly little chain. The great skill being in locating the sweet spot on the lens that allows me to see in close enough detail to do things without rendering myself blind to the on-coming lorry.
The somewhat unique shape of my eyeballs, following a pre-full face helmet motorbike accident in my feckless youth, means that I cannot wear varifocal contact lenses – please don’t ask why, I don’t know – so I have, in one eye a lens that allows me to read and, in the other, a lens that allows me to see. My brain, apparently, sorts it all out. I don’t know how when it constantly loses track of the plot in Vera. Until the point of that particular teenage impact my vision was fine – although not good enough, you might quite fairly point out, to see the tree – and I found out that I would need to wear glasses after leaving hospital. I remember, so vividly, wearing them for the first time and realising that trees still had leaves, but being incredibly confused by the fact that they all appeared to be falling over. It would have been very useful if the tree I had hit on my bike had done so. I like to think that the slight asymmetry I now have makes my face more interesting, although, in honesty, I think that lop-sided is probably nearer the truth.
Possibly because of that, I have grown to like the look of my face better in lenses than in glasses which never quite seem to be on straight, but I’m guessing it’s only because I can’t see it as well. Although, rather like a woman with a bra, my lenses are the first thing I want to get out of when I get home in the evening. They become more uncomfortable as the day drags on; they seem to serve less purpose as soon as I get behind my own front door; it feels good to let my eyeballs resume their normal shape and to give them a little air at the end of the day.
Now, during the course of my daily toils I currently wear a mask all day and I spend that time with people who are also wearing masks, and more often than not, the eyes alone do not give me nearly enough information for the rest of me to have the faintest idea of who I am talking to*. My facial recognition is notoriously bad, but robbed of three-quarters of the relevant information, it just gives up and goes home and, in this respect, unusual spectacles are a godsend. The more Elton John, the better. (I’ll be honest here, E.J. wasn’t the first person that popped into my head, but I thought that there was a better chance of my international readers knowing who Elton was, rather than Timmy Mallett.) In these days of severely limited contact and muffled voices hidden away amongst lips and nostrils, these tiny plastic windows on the world are often all I have to go on when I try to identify a face that I vaguely recollect. If it is you, and if you decide by any chance that you too want to be able to see in the rain, I, for one, will no longer have any idea of who you are…
*…to whom I am talking. For Mr Wells-Cole, to prove that I did, indeed, learn something at school…
The first thing that crossed Dinah’s mind when she woke that morning was that the head on the pillow was almost certainly not her own. The second thing was that neither was the pillow – nor the bed come to that. The third thing, as she was counting, was that, wherever she was currently lying, she smelled like she had been there for a week.
‘Sorry about the T-shirt,’ said Shaw. ‘It’s all I could find.’
Dinah’s eyes snapped open and her brain recoiled from the light that flooded in. It actually banged a drum between her ears. Her mouth opened and closed, as if in speech, but as she could not even think what to say, she emitted no sound. She pulled the sheet up around herself, before venturing a little peek under the cover. Well, at least she was wearing something, even if it was clearly not her own. She peered down inside the neck. Oh God! She screwed her eyes tightly shut and breathed in as deeply as she dared in the circumstances.
‘You were a little… soiled,’ explained Shaw, and Dinah felt herself bridling at his obvious ability to read what was left of her mind. ‘You managed to get most of your clothes off yourself, in the end. The rest I left.’
Dinah shuffled down, uncomfortably in the bed, relieved to confirm that she was still wearing the rather dog-eared pants that she remembered deciding would suffice the day before. ‘Oh Lord,’ she groaned. I suppose you’re going to tell me that you’ve washed and dried all of my clothes, are you?’
Shaw was dumbstruck. ‘Me? Good god no. They’re in a bag outside. I think when you see them you will probably wish I had burned them. Would you like a cup of tea?’
‘Oh yes please,’ Dinah croaked in reply, realising for the first time that her throat was in drought.
‘Don’t suppose you’ve any idea where the kettle is?’
Dinah opened one eye, to try and limit the amount of light that assaulted her, and tried to take in the room. Slowly, feature by feature, she recognized it as the back room of the office she shared with Shaw. The bed, she realised, was what her mother used to call a put-you-up. ‘Do you always sleep in here?’ she asked.
‘Well, not always, said Shaw.
‘Only I’ve never seen a bed in here before.’
‘It folds up behind the curtain. I usually use the armchair.’ He indicated the sagging remains of a once-upon-a-time chair that appeared to be decaying in the corner of the room. As her eye became increasingly accustomed to the light, she could see that it was, itself, draped in a recently vacated blanket.
‘What on earth have you done to this T-shirt?’ she asked.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Shaw. ‘As I said, it was all I could find. I may have used it a time or two undercover. I had to get you… you know.’
‘What do you mean undercover?’
‘I may have slept in it… a time or two.’
‘Under a flyover, from the smell of it.’
‘It’s possible…’ he said.
She thought about this for a long time before asking the question she most needed answering. ‘What happened last night?’
‘Last night? Oh nothing…’ She gave him a hard stare. ‘I found you in the park,’ he said, trying to make it sound as routine as he could.
‘The park?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was I doing in the park? What were you doing in the park?’
‘I was looking for you, of course.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, I’m not entirely sure. It just seemed to be the right thing to do.’
Not for the first time, Dinah found herself staring open-mouthed at this man to whom fate had tethered her cart with a mixture of bemusement and amazement. Not for the first time did she feel that he could actually see inside her head: as if he was stirring up the contents like a Cup-a-Soup.
‘You seemed a little out of sorts,’ he said.
‘It was my birthday.’
‘You never said.’
‘I don’t celebrate it.’
Shaw raised a quizzical eyebrow.
‘It was more in the way of a wake,’ Dinah responded. ‘In memory of so many wasted years.’
‘Who were you with?’
‘With?’
‘Ah,’ Shaw gave her a look that was intended to say Ok, the subject is closed. I won’t ask any more. Of course, if you choose to volunteer any more information… Dinah did not, but she was curious.
‘What, exactly, was I doing when you found me?’
‘Crying, mostly,’ he said. ‘Bit of shouting. You threw your shoes in the pond.’
‘I still don’t know why you were looking for me.’
‘Like I said, you seemed out of sorts.’
Dinah knew Shaw by now. She knew that questioning would take her nowhere. He liked to preserve the mystery: liked you to believe that there was more to him than there really was. The trouble being that there actually was. She tried to think what had brought her here, to this point in her life, but the effort was too great. ‘The kettle’s in the office,’ she said at last. ‘You’ll have to fill it in the toilet… Not from the toilet.’
Shaw smiled and left the room. Dinah suddenly felt alone and vulnerable. ‘Shaw!’ she shouted.
‘Still here,’ he soothed. Infuriating!
Dinah propped herself up a little on the pillow, a tiny doubt began to nag in her head. ‘Shaw!’ she yelled again.
‘Yes?’
‘Where’s my bra? Is it with my clothes?’
‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But I think it is with your shoes.’ He came back into the room carrying a jam jar and a measuring jug filled with something that approximated tea. ‘I couldn’t find the mugs,’ he said.
Dinah took the jam jar gratefully. ‘Was I naked?’ she asked.
‘Not completely,’ he said. ‘Otherwise the police would have arrested you, I think.’
‘Oh Lord.’
‘Because it was only your top half, they let me bring you home.’
It was Dinah’s turn to raise an eyebrow.
‘I told them you have eczema…’
Dinah sipped the massively over-sweetened tea appreciatively. Here, hung-over, in a strange bed, drinking what amounted to brown sugar-syrup from a jam jar, in the company of – he would admit himself – a very strange man, Dinah suddenly realised that she felt safe – and stupid – but mostly safe.
‘I’ll go and get you some clothes,’ offered Shaw, uncertain of how, or from where.
‘No need,’ said Dinah. ‘Bottom drawer in the desk. I always keep a spare set, just in case.’
‘Of course you do,’ grinned Shaw. ‘I should have known…’
This segment of the story came about after a comment by Herb set me thinking. I wrote it immediately after publishing episode 5, but I wanted to leave a little gap before we went back to them. To give them some air. I’m pleased I did. I think this is probably my favourite segment to date.
You can find more of Dinah and Shaw’s story below:
Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.
Part 4.
Part 5.
Part 7.
In accordance with the general navel-gazing nature of this little thread, today has been one of those days when I find myself with nothing much to say, and that has forced me to look back on what I have written over the past few weeks and acknowledge the fact that I have been studiously avoiding any mention of the elephant in the room* – Covid19. Whilst this dratted virus has been shaping everything I do and the way in which I am forced to do it, I have assiduously endeavoured to keep it out of these pages – not, I will admit, with total success. Why? Well, it’s not funny, is it? During lockdown I was more than happy to write about my own reactions to the situation, my own way of dealing with the threat, but never to directly address the viral cause of the particular set of obtuse behavioural peccadilloes that saw me through that time of rationed loo roll and pasta shortages. My default position in dealing with an absurd situation – even a threatening one – is to laugh at it. It’s not much, but it’s all I have.
I am fully aware that this approach offers an almost infinite variety of ways in which I can annoy people. I am conscious of my unrivalled ability to thoroughly piss people off at the best of times, but there seems to be so little I can do about it. It’s a natural aptitude. The gift that just keeps giving.
Any-old-how, to get to the point, which was… erh… oh yes, we spent a few hours on Sunday, Mrs Mc and myself, with our elder daughter and her family at their home. They live a two hour journey away from us and who can tell when the door may be closed on further visits? The grandkids like having me around – they don’t have a trampoline – and we get to feel useful by doing a few jobs around the place. I think that we are all aware that this inter-household mixing – even within families – is likely to be stopped soon, so we take what chance we can. On the drive home – in the very early evening – darkness closed in around us with startling rapidity and I realised that this is shaping up to be a very long winter indeed. One in which this virus is bound to loom large – even amongst those of us who will do all that we can to ignore it.
You have been warned!
*My grandma, queen of the mixed metaphor (although probably, in this particular case, the mixed idiom – who knows?) would always say that there was a white elephant in the room:
Perhaps my grandma was much wiser than we ever realised…
The briefest pause for thought: the moment when you go for a midnight wee and you don’t even remember eating asparagus.
So, I filled in all the online forms – there were many – and I certified that I am showing no Covid Symptoms and I have not been in any contact with anybody who is showing Covid symptoms. All was well. I got up early this morning after a sleepless night (I am terrified of the dentist) and showered etc in preparation. According to the blurb they sent me, the door would be locked when I arrived for my appointment and I had to ring them to let them know that I was standing outside in the rain – this despite the fact that on the several times that I have tried to get hold of them over the past few weeks I have often been kept hanging on for hours – at which point they would let me in, ask me to sanitize, check that I was wearing a mask for the journey along the corridor, and ‘kindly do not touch walls, doors, furniture etc and please refrain from using the toilet’.
OK, I was ready.
I skipped breakfast and I skipped coffee and I was brushing my teeth for the third time when the phone rang…
It will come as no surprise to anybody even vaguely familiar with this country to know that my appointment has been cancelled again. It would appear that my dentist was not able to fill in her online form as smugly as I. She is currently unwell, displaying some Covid-like symptoms. (Let’s be honest here – all symptoms are Covid-like if you put your mind to it.) It could, of course, have been worse: she could have started displaying the symptoms tomorrow.
I am now booked in (again) in two weeks time. My dentist will by then (I fervently hope) be well and free of all symptoms – unless, of course, she’s got some new ones. I will have to fill in all of the online forms again – I tried to explain that whilst the future was unknown, it was not possible for my medical history to have changed, that I would always be a male and that there was, to the best of my knowledge, no means of me being anything other than 61 years of age, but to no avail. If I want to see the dentist, I must fill in the forms again. All of them.
Anyway, we’ve all seen the graphs, two weeks is a very long time. Plenty of time, in fact, for my hitherto benign demi-tooth to start pounding and certainly more than enough to ensure that my appointment is once again cancelled due to a further tightening of Covid restrictions.
If you are in any way interested (and, for the record, even if you’re not) I will keep you updated. Once again, the clock is ticking…
For anyone who remains even remotely interested, I am still running at least three times a week. Usually I do two runs of 4k and one of 5k. Some days – mostly when I have other things I really should be doing instead – I run much further. Sadly, the shit is still there on my return. Some days, when the weather is bad, I don’t run as far, but I run faster – always taking great care not to trip over my own halo. I don’t actually enjoy the running any more than I ever did, but I do now go out secure in the knowledge that short of any mishap, I will finish the run and the chances are fairly good that I will not die on the way.
Sadly, I have now developed a routine associated with run days which, if I am honest, is starting to border on ritual. I wear the same things, I follow the same route, I listen to the same songs. I really must shake it up. I am beginning to annoy myself and normally, of course, I find myself the very best of company. If anyone has a life available, I should probably get one – but I shan’t be looking today, because just at the moment I have deeper concerns.
You see, since finishing the Couch to 5k programme, I have tried, as best I am able, to stick to the routine which, in addition to running three times a week, dictates that I leave a gap of at least forty-eight hours between runs. I run on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, so what do I do on the days in between? Well, drink whisky and eat peanuts, if I’m honest. When I decided that I needed an alternative, I tried gin and chocolate, but even I realised that that wasn’t really what it meant, and so I looked for a healthy alternative, preferably one that did not involve hummus. What I discovered was my daughter’s discarded exercise bike and my old redundant laptop. So, I have taken to climbing aboard the exercise bike on these non-running days, whilst watching Old Grey Whistle Test DVD’s: an ancient fat man amongst the decaying clutter of his garage, pedalling for all he is worth and getting nowhere fast. My whole life has become metaphor.
Consider my garage. It is chock-full of junk. If I manage to cram something new into one end of it, it is highly likely that something else, completely unconnected, will pop out at the other. Whatever does make it in, is inevitably lost within hours, never to be found again until I trip over it some years later whilst searching for something else entirely. Occasionally I will find a space in there, but I will have no idea of what used to fill it. If I fill the gap, I knock over and break something else in the process. When I do, eventually, find what has gone missing, it will no longer fit back in. At the risk of labouring the point, my garage in no way now fulfils its primary purpose of storing a car: it is full of general rammel, little of which belongs there, but all of which stops it being used for what it was designed for.
Consider my exercise bike. It is not, as I have mentioned, actually my own. It requires a lot of effort to get it going and, when I do, it goes nowhere. It is noisy, unsightly and boring. When I have nowhere to run, I pedal to the same place and when I get there, I’ve got nowhere to go but back. I think that in future I should mount the static velocipede only when it is not safe for me to run e.g. when there is weather outside. (My wife lives in constant fear of me falling over. I haven’t done so yet, but when I do, she will have earned the right to be there at my side, with a nicely supportive ‘I told you so.’) Worse, I’ve just caught sight of myself in the mirror. I look pretty much the same as I did six months ago, and I feel pretty much the same, so where does all of this pain and anguish leave me anyway? Well, I certainly have a very fit pair of legs – they have to be, they carry about my lard-arse top half, which currently gets no exercise at all outside of lifting food to my mouth, so perhaps I need to buy some weights: dumbbells, or a heavier TV remote…
Actually, I think I’ve changed my mind. Has anybody seen a life around here that I can have after all?
The previous running diary instalment ‘Yet More Random Running Thoughts’ is here.
The next running diary instalment ‘Foot Where?’ is here.
The whole sorry saga begins here.
So, having spent part two of this weekend-long whinge detailing some of the many things that I do not ‘do’ on my mobile phone (parts one and two are here) I suppose I ought to wind it up by looking at one or two of the things that I do. After all, I wouldn’t want you thinking that I’m an old weirdo, would I?
I have an insatiable thirst for knowledge: what I don’t know, I Google. (Other search engines are available – although nobody ever uses them.) My Google searches are usually complicated, often involving the quest to find the name of an actor who used to be in a programme, the title of which escapes me just for the minute, with another actor whose name I cannot recall, who used to be in something else with somebody different. Sometimes I find what I am looking for, but more often than not I get distracted along the way and wind up attempting to watch a long-lost episode of Dad’s Army in the mistaken belief that it is the news.
Then we come to the various ‘banking’ apps that litter my phone. Of late, the phone has become an integral security level for every other platform of banking. Actually going into the bank and talking to someone is severely frowned upon. I now have an algorithm, rather than a bank manager, to tell me that I am overdrawn. I have started, in these troubled times, to use Apple Pay and I am amazed at how easy it all is, although it does occur to me that if somebody had stolen my mobile phone ten years ago, they might have been able to have a fairly lengthy conversation with their mother in Australia at my expense. Now, they could probably visit her. I have to guard my phone like the Crown Jewels and protect my authorising finger against all damage. My finger print opens my phone, I dare not rely upon facial recognition. I have a passport that has not allowed me back into the country for the last seven years. If you have ever seen a man at passport control being yelled at to ‘Go to the desk at the end,’ that man was probably me. Last year I had to queue behind three young ladies coming home from Dubai who had, as far as I could see, walked into many doors along the way. They had, it transpired, been to a ‘beauty clinic’ whilst on holiday with the net effect that they would not have been recognised by their own mothers, let alone an overworked CPU. If it wasn’t for the fact that it was the bit doing the talking, I’m not sure I would have known where the face was meant to be. It was a good job that they had all had their names tattooed in Arabic on their backs. When it came to be my turn at the desk, I handed over the errant passport. The passport officer looked at it, he looked at me, and he said, ‘Have you got any other proof of identity?’ I said, ‘Not on me. It’s all in my wife’s bag.’ He sighed the sigh of the deeply bored and said ‘Fine,’ before waving me through. I have no idea why the computer couldn’t do that.
Despite the fact that I am, by and large, unable to follow moving images on the tiny screen offered by my phone, I do spend a large proportion of my idle-life staring at BBC News and BBC Sport – because I am both very old and very, very sad. I have this need to know what is going on. I do not know why. Why do I need to know what is going on in the world, when half the time I have no idea of what is going on between my ears? My phone brings the news to me instantly: I am constantly updated, informed and, at the same time, ever more helpless. The world crumbles about me in real time and I run around with a silicone gun I cannot use and a refill I have forgotten to chop the end off. There is little in this world that makes me feel more useless than the hopelessness of others.
I have a QR reader. The post-Lockdown world has forced me to become familiar with it. It reads those odd little square barcode things that fill the bottom right hand corner of almost all shop window advertisements. It takes me to pages of information, in which I have no interest, about companies from which I once bought a pair of pants or a burger (seldom both). It has always been the most useless of apps on my phone – although I realise that, should I ever want to return to the pub, it will become the most vital. It is the only way I will now be able to entice the bar staff to bring me the wrong drinks to the wrong table with fifteen packets of pork scratchings and a maraschino cherry for my dry martini; it is the only way that I will be able to order scampi and chips and to get soup in a basket. This is the New Normal App. I preferred the old normal. At least whatever beer ended up slopped down my crotch was my own.
And finally, I have a weather app, because I don’t like looking out of the window…
So, there we are; end of part three and all I (currently) have to say about my mobile phone. I did consider, by way of an experiment, posting this week’s posts straight from my phone, but I’m pretty sure that I would have just ended up ordering a tartan dog bed or signing up for banjo lessons, so it will be posted in the normal way, through my laptop. One of these days I must take a look at what’s on there…
Well, I am sure that it will come as no surprise to you to discover that L.B.M. (Life Before Mobiles) part two, is no longer about life without mobiles, but actually about life with them. (Part one, by the way, is here.) Furthermore, I now realise that a large number of my readers will have no idea whatsoever of what I mean by ‘Mobile’ and I, therefore, regret the original title anyway. For many of you, what I mean is cell-phone. I could, I suppose, change the title to L.B.C-P part two, but it sounds unwieldy and, anyway, if we’re going to be pedantic here, it should by now be ‘Life With Cell-Phones’ and therefore no longer ‘part two’ anyway. Too confusing. Please accept that like all self-respecting sequels, this follow-up has little to do with its predecessor and serves simply to deliver us at the foothills of part three. I hope you understand. You don’t? No, me neither…
So, having established in ‘part one’ that my mobile phone has all manner of features that a telephone box does not, I will take a little peek at what I can find on my own home screen to try and describe what some of them are. This will not take long because I have an iPhone and it is only a matter of minutes before the battery runs out…
I have BBC iPlayer, ITV Hub, More4, YouTube, Netflix and all manner of other pieces of technological wizardry that allow me to watch TV and film on demand. Except that I don’t, because I can’t see them. When my wife and I got married, we had a fourteen inch Black & White TV and 20/20 vision. Being a get-up-and-go, aspirational couple, we bought a colour TV when we moved into our first house – it was also a fourteen inch – and we quite happily watched that little box until our children wanted us to have something that they weren’t ashamed of. Since then, the size of our TV has grown as our eyesight has failed. We are currently on forty-three inches of LCD, whatever that is*, which is where we have been forced to stop as the space between wall and fireplace will not accommodate anything bigger unless we extend the house, so our chairs are getting closer. The chances of me being able to follow anything on the tiny screen of my phone are miniscule (as, indeed, are the tiny ant-figures that lurch hither and thither across it). I have the normal ‘old person’ failing of not being able to see anything that is dark – when the screen is also little more than the size of a decent biscuit, I am lost. I do not know what is going on most of the time when I am watching a film on the giant screen at a cinema: on a postage stamp I have no chance.
I also have the Kindle app which allows me access to all of the books that I have on my Kindle proper but, crucially, smaller. It gives me options: I can view a page of Lilliputian dimensions, readable only with one of those full-page magnifying glasses that my grandma used to have for reading Woman’s Own; or I can have a readable font size that means there are about six words to a page and none of them forming a recognisable sentence. I read text messages on my phone and WhatsApp missives, but nothing that is supposed to make sense.
As far as I can see, I don’t appear to have Facebook, Instagram or Twitter on my phone. At least, if I do, I have no idea how to find them. I do not really have a Social Media presence, although I am a regular user of the family WhatsApp group, if only to see what the grandkids are still prepared to allow me a little window into their lives. I know that, sooner or later, they will start to keep me at arms length, so as long as they want to spend time with me – even virtually – I embrace the chance with every fibre of my will. And we Facetime – as long as they call me – and when they’ve gone I experience the sensation of feeling hollow yet full at the same time: like looking at a croissant on the morning of the night after the bottle of scotch before.
It will all make sense when we get to part three – I think. I cannot promise, because I haven’t finished it yet, having only just decided that part two finishes here…
*It used to be a cheap supermarket watch that failed to work as soon as you pushed the little button on the side for the first time and from that point onwards continually blinked ’88:88’ until you hit it with something hard.
I started this post, as usual, with no idea of where it was going and, before I knew it, I discovered that it was going to run far, far too long for a single post and I still had no idea where it was going. As I type this, it is heading towards a full week’s worth of words. I have no idea how it will eventually split into three, where it will split into three, and into which three, exactly, it will eventually split. Hopefully, by the time I post it, it will have miraculously fallen into place. If it hasn’t – I’m sorry. If it has – I’m still sorry…
Do you remember life before mobile phones? Do you remember the thrill of being uncontactable? Do you remember searching for a working phone box that had not previously been used as a toilet, only to discover that you didn’t have the correct change with which to make the call anyhow? Do you remember breaking down in the car (because it was raining/too hot/too cold/there was a lump of dust the size of Venus in the carburettor) and having absolutely no idea whatsoever of how you were going to summon help? Do you remember the sudden, desperate need to know which TV programme some actor or another used to be in, with no possible way of finding out without a free fortnight and ten years worth of back copies of the Radio Times?
We all take our little pocket devices, and the ability they have to make the sum total of all world knowledge available to us at the whim of a thumb, completely for granted now. How quickly we have forgotten how life used to be. I have written before (here) about how different pre-mobile telephone communication was, but there is so much more to it: our modern mobiles are so much more than phones. Picture life without a satnav when you fancy a curry in a strange town. Consider life without the ability to take a photograph of every meal you have ever eaten and send it instantly to everyone you have ever known? Imagine not knowing how many steps you have taken in a day – what kind of life is that?
I feel that the time is right to take a little peek at what my own mobile has brought to my everyday life. If the order is somewhat random, it is because I am simply looking at the screen of my phone as I type and trying to decipher what each little icon stands for; what it is supposed to do, and, finally, what I actually do with it. There are apps that I have never opened; there are apps that provoke a panic attack simply because they look like something that I will not be able to work, and there are apps that, by some miracle, I have both understood and mastered – it is to these beacons of hope that I now refer.
When I was twenty years old, Sony introduced the Walkman – the first proper progression from the ‘portable’ cassette players of my youth (the size and weight of two house bricks). The Walkman was a quarter of the size and a quarter of the weight and came with ‘miniature headphones’ which meant that the rest of the bus didn’t have to listen to what you were playing or threaten to ‘stuff that bloody contraption right up your bloody arse if you don’t turn the bloody racket down’. Progress, being what it is, the cassette tape of the Walkman was soon replaced by the Compact Disc, and the Walkman with the Discman, which added the capacity for the music to ‘skip’ like a vertiginous ice skater at the slightest of movements to the range of listening pleasures. Choosing the ten CD’s you wished to take on holiday, to be safely sheathed within the Discman’s case, was one of the joys of preparation – taking several weeks to perfect. The fun kind of went from that with the arrival of iPod, and the ability to take enough music with you to power a pirate radio station, in a single piece of apparatus that was just exactly the perfect size to be lost on the transfer bus. These days, when I run (You didn’t know I ran? I must tell you about it some time) I take my phone with me because, quite frankly, I feel as if I have to have it in case I ever have to make that ‘last call’ – secure in the knowledge that my GPS signal and What3Words app will have the emergency services at my side quicker than you can say ‘No Network’. With my phone comes access to the entire library of all of the world’s music ever, which I listen to through a pair of Bluetooth headphones that fall out and drop down a drain hardly ever.
This is true progress…
…and a convenient place to finish. Part two awaits you tomorrow and part three a day later, by the time we get there, I promise that it is almost certain to make sense.
Getting On 