Memories’n’things
They’re slipping out of our hands.
Here’s the latest de-skilling exercise. My radio tells me that there are now plans to dispense with paper passports. Apparently we’re all going to be swanning through airports with all our personal information on our phones.
The talk in the studio was all about how difficult it is to have to carry physical passports along with everything else. Oh! Dear!
But it occurred to me — and I’m no more a Luddite than the next grumpy old curmudgeon — that getting to the airport — with luggage — would be far beyond the skillset of anybody who’d lost the skill of carrying a passport.
Chuckling to myself — with what sounded from the inside like a satisfyingly cynical chuckle — I picked up a pen and my shopping list and wrote Aerial? below Yoghurt and Cereal.
That’s what I’d come into the kitchen to do. But I’d turned on the radio and made a(nother) mug of coffee instead. Habit? Age? Both, probably. Either way, cutting down on caffeine is not working out.
Where was I? Oh yes — Aerial?
My house is so advanced that my TV aerial no longer receives television signals. I bought a “Smart” TV a few years back, and once my daughter and her partner had attached it to the wall, a few months later, I found that it was only good for watching DVDs.
[Yes, yes, the internet, I know, but I have a computer for that.]
No problem; I like actually physically owning films. And I like watching them on the little DVD-player machine I bought from the supermarket.
But I decided, just recently, that if I was going to go on losing time to glossy US TV people denouncing their president on YouTube, on my tablet, I might as well go back to scrolling mindlessly through Freeview instead. On my TV. Like old times.
So I looked into my TV-aerial problem and found that aerials installed before — I forget the date — are no longer capable of receiving TV signals. I need to replace it with a — word beginning with W — aerial or a — I think this was it — T-type aerial.
[Yes! I know that I can watch TV on — Yes! I know that if I get an HDMI cable and connect my laptop to — Yes! I know all that! Wifi! Broadband! Fibre! Yes! I know it’s all simple and — oh no, please don’t — you’ll just show me how to do it. Stop! Sit down!]
I miss Freeview like I miss boredom. That serendipitous thing of pausing for a moment of Christopher Lee as Dracula, then ten seconds of a rugby match, then — is that Lawrence of Arabia? — then Peppa Pig then The Towering Inferno then the news. We can’t do random any more.
We can’t, can we? Even with YouTube, I have to choose which apocalyptic clickbait headline to click on.
I miss Freeview like I miss boredom like I miss those 3am stints on the sofa with sleepless babies. I don’t want to be back in the moment of doing them so much as I want them present in the background of my life. They’re like, I don’t know, the pencil-shading that gives a drawing its depth.
I want the stamps in my old passports. The ticket stubs. Those paper wallets of photographs and negatives. The envelopes of foreign money stashed away for the next trip. Come to that, I wouldn’t say no to the shelves of dog-eared phrasebooks and the printed itineraries.
I want the enormous stuffed portmanteau-suitcase of past physical things that I can pack and unpack with my hands, and then just look at. With all the luggage tags and labels left intact. And all the memories.
I want more than just this shiny little future rectangle of so-called connectivity.
Even if you did remember to pack the charger.
