Internet Distraction!

A few days ago, I was reading the football results on the BBC. Two hours later, I was scrolling down sites of ancient ruins in Qatar.

If you follow football, you can probably guess how I got from A to B via X, Y and Z. If you can’t, then Google it.

Everybody knows what I’m talking about here. Those lost hours (days, months) scrolling down Wikipedia entries on dead rockstars. Do you know Bob Marley died of acral lentiginous melanoma?

I’m not even a heavy internet user. I generally use it for the football scores, banking, bureaucracy, writing this blog and listening to music. I don’t even use it for work as I work on a farm. But like everyone, I sometimes get sucked into the void.

True, I occasionally learn things. I learnt about String Theory recently which I included in the post before this. But most of the time, it’s guff.

Take the Guardian newspaper for example. I’m a keen supporter of the paper and its values, but most of the pieces I’ve read before. Different topics, different authors, but the ideas are the same. Features, articles and opinion pieces recycled whenever there’s some special commemoration, anniversary, or event in the offing. Another climate change summit, another slew of ideas and protests that won’t be taken on board by the politicians, because in short, they don’t give a shit.

On the football front, whenever Man Utd or Barcelona have a string of bad results, there’s a mountain of articles on who should be sacked and why and who should replace them. I’ve followed football all my life and we’re having the same arguments now over the sacking of Solskaer as we had in 1990 over the sacking of Alex Ferguson. (If you’ve no idea what I’m talking about – you can read on now.)

In short, history repeats itself. We all know that. And yet we keep on reading about it, again, and again, and again.

Wikipedia is fantastic but it’s also annoying that almost every other word or phrase in a sentence has a link to another Wikipedia page. By the time you’ve finished reading say a piece on rock formations in the Llanberis Valley in North Wales, you’ve got half the internet open citing everything from granite chemistry to the Stereophonics.

Saying this, (and I have been trying to crowbar this song into my blog for some weeks now), I did find out about Alain Bashung recently just by mindlessly browsing the internet.

I was seeing if the word Lego (as in the small plastic brick) is the same in French as it is in English. It is. And it led me to a song called Comme un Lego written by Gérald Manset and sung by Alain Bashung in 2008. I liked it so much that I’ve started to sing and play it (with mixed results). But I’m glad I found it so maybe browsing isn’t always a waste of time.

Sadly, Alain Bashung died in 2009. Lung Cancer.

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Why I STILL Don’t Own a Smartphone

Do you remember when mobile phones were small and compact? When they easily fitted in your pocket? When the battery lasted for over a week? When they did nothing else except take calls. Do you remember those days?

A few weeks ago, my old Nokia 105 (above) clapped out, and I went to the store to buy a new phone. I was set on a smartphone. Why not? Get with the times.

When I arrived at the impossibly over-heated store, I asked the shop assistant about them. His eyes cracked open from his long shift, and he showed me to a stand.

‘We have the new iPhone 12 for €1300, or we have a basic one for €909…’

‘I’m sorry???’ I spluttered. ‘Can I stop you there? €1300! You must have misunderstood me, I’m looking for a phone not a small boat.’

The assistant stared at me unamused. Must have been a long shift after all. I was pretty blown away if I’m honest. Yes, I knew these things were pricey. But €1300 for a phone? I never realised the world had gone so bonkers.

‘We have cheaper ones,’ he said, noticing my shock, and showed me to another stand.

I stood there gazing at a showy array of chunky technology. ‘Do you have anything smaller?’

‘Smaller?’ he replied.

‘Yes. Smaller. Like in the old days.’

His eyes glazed over and he seemed to fall back to sleep.‘ Err, I think we have some Nokias over there,’ he wearily informed me. ‘But they are not smartphones.’

‘Great,’ I beamed and a few minutes later left the store with a brand new Nokia 105 with dual sim, flashlight, radio and headphones.

Can I watch a film on it? No

Can I watch TV on it? No

Can I listen to music on it? No.

Can I make zoom calls on it? No

Can I take photos on it? No

Can I access the internet on it? No

Can I read the news on it? No

Do I want to? No.

When mobile phones became popular in the mid-1990s (I’m 46, so I remember this) people wanted them small. The smaller the better. Remember those trendy adverts for Motorolas that sat in your palm and had the battery life of interplanetary space probes.

So what happened? Overnight mobile phones became as heavy as dustbins, and as clunky as plates.

Here is a quick comparison:

Weight of iPhone 12: 228 grams.

Weight of Nokia 105: 57 grams

Dimensions of Samsung Galaxy: 150mm x 75mm

Dimensions of Nokia 105: 85mm x 45mm

But here is the best one.

Battery Life of iPhone: 9 hours

Battery life of Nokia 105: 18.5 days.

That is not a typo. Yes, 18.5 days. That’s longer than it took the Apollo astronauts to get to the Moon and back. In fact, if they had taken my Nokia fully charged, they could have called Mum to say they were safe the moment they landed. If they’d taken an iPhone, it would have probably clapped out shortly after blast-off.

‘Hello? Is there anyone out there? Shit! The battery’s dead.’

*phone dimensions and prices are approximate and may depend on the model. Although a Nokia 105 is round about €20** from most retailers. Yes, that is not a typo. Twenty.

**Or in Pounds Sterling, multiply 20 by the Euro Brexit rate and see what you get. If the shit has hit the fan, it’ll about £20 or more. If things are OK, it’ll be about £16-18. In $ it’ll be about 25.

***I don’t know why I’m even doing the arithmetic, because I know no one will buy one. But you might.

Further reading: Why I don’t have a Smartphone here.

(Image/Nokia © 2019)

The Dead Art of Letter Writing

Last Saturday while reading What am I doing here by Bruce Chatwin in the bath, I was struck by the thought: When was the last time I wrote a letter?

When I lived and worked on a farm in Provence in 1994, I had no phone, no radio, no TV, and of course no internet. Only a guitar, cigarettes, wine, and a cat, whose name I can’t remember (Pascal, perhaps?), to entertain me. I used to write regularly to my parents and my friends, and always looked forward to receiving a letter back. It was an incredible event.

I remember the yellow La Poste van rolling slowly up the rutted driveway at about ten-thirty in the morning to deliver the mail to the farm’s owner and some of the other workers who lived there. About once a week (strangely it was always on a Saturday) there would be a letter for me. Either a brown manila envelope from my father, posted from his office, or small, cheaply-made white envelopes from my friends.

I used to save it until the evening and open the envelope under the ancient olive tree in the yard, reading it many times over. Laugh and reminisce and sometimes want to be back in Nottingham with my friends going out on the town, drinking and meeting girls.

Then I would go into the cavernous kitchen of the farm to cook some strange Anglo-French concoction — normally a steak sandwich with brown sauce — and settle down to my reply. Sometimes writing five or six sides of A4 about my life on the farm or things I was looking forward to on returning to England. I would then address it and get excited about posting it in the village on the Monday, which I went to anyway to buy cigarettes.

Now I think about it, it wasn’t really the news or the puerile banter in the letter that counted, but the process of sending the letter. The writing of it, addressing it, sticking on the stamp, walking to the post office in the village. The routine was far greater than what I had to say to my friends. And the ritual of traipsing down to the post office to converse in my mangled French with the postmistress once a week was priceless.

For my brother and sister, who are fifteen years younger than me, the idea of communicating by letter with their friends, is utterly ludicrous. They’ve never done it; there’s never been the necessity. So why would they?

By the time they reached the age of nineteen (the age I was in Provence), the internet and the smartphone ruled, and letter writing became something their parents did — or their older brother. The very time-consuming process of writing on real paper, addressing it and walking down to the post office belongs, in their minds, to the Middle Ages.

The only exception I guess is the Christmas card. But rarely do these contain any pearls of wisdom except a photo of a robin and Happy Christmas scrawled inside. Love Bob and June xxx

When I did return to England after my adventures in Provence, email, texts, and mobile phones were much more in abundance, and I never really experienced that joy again. I wrote letters, but the frequency decreased until one day I must have written my last letter.

And that’s what I was thinking about in the bath last Saturday. When was this? When did I write a letter addressed to a person I know? To be honest I have no idea. Bar job applications, paying bills, or sending documents out. But it must be twenty years since I wrote a personal letter. And I miss it.

And brings me back to a topic that floats around my head most days. Has technology made life better?

I can actually make a good comparison here. Because as it happens, I’m living on a farm in France right now. Alas, not in Provence, but in rainy Normandy. But I’m still on a remote farm, and if I was here in 1994, things I guess would be very similar.

Except now I’ve got the internet, TV, films, and two mobile SIM cards (although I haven’t got a Smartphone). True, the reception and internet reliability isn’t great, but I can still phone, write and converse with people pretty much instantaneously

A yellow La Poste van still comes up the lane a few times a week, but it isn’t carrying handwritten letters anymore. Oh no, today the postman’s arms are filled with supermarket advertisements, bills and Amazon parcels. There are no badly scrawled letters from my friends giving me the latest news and gossip. No firm instructions from my father to keep working hard and keep learning French. Now it’s just photos of people’s lunch on Facebook.

I blame myself though. I could write a letter, and I often ask myself, why don’t I? But it would feel strange, wouldn’t it? People might actually think I’ve gone crazy.

They might ask: ‘Philip? Why are you writing letters? Haven’t you heard of the internet?’

‘Yes, I have,’ I would reply. ‘That’s why I’m writing you a letter.’

I’m 45 now and a long time has passed since those letter-writing days of Provence — pre-email, pre-mobile phone, pre-social media. Sitting under the olive tree in the sunshine looking at the ants crawl over the baked ground reading letters from my friends. Now I just get an annoying beep to read someone is going to the movies or a new restaurant. Great, I think! Why don’t you tell me about it in a letter, it might be more interesting?

Le Glitch by Philip Ogley is out now. Click here