I am a dinosaur

I mentioned on my website that I forgot to charge up my camera before the book signing at the Winchester Discovery centre and that I use a camera because I don’t carry a mobile.

I don’t usually carry a mobile, I should say. As I explained, we have one between us, a small, bricklike object which usually lives in the car and which has only one use: sending and receiving telephone calls.  It has no other attribute. No camera; no apps. It is certainly not in any sense ‘smart’.

Just occasionally, one of us will take it out with us, most likely me ringing home to say that the bus didn’t turn up for some reason and please can I have a lift… We also have to remember now to take it out once a month or so and  make a call in order to avoid our number being removed and given to somebody else (It gave us a nasty surprise when that happened unexpectedly; cost us a whole £10 that we had just put onto it when doing the weekly shop. It is, of course, Pay-As-You-Go). We are usually stumped for someone to bother with an otherwise pointless call, so we ring our home number and stare idly for a moment at the house phone ringing all to itself before switching the mobile off.

Why ever don’t we have proper, all singing, all dancing modern mobiles, did I hear you ask? This is 2014. What are we – dinosaurs?

Okay, let me think.

There are moments – as at the book signing – when something just a bit ‘smarter’ would have been handy, but in the main, if something doesn’t improve the quality of your life, you don’t need it and what would not improve my life would be to be instantly contactable wherever I may be. If I think I need someone to contact me on a very important matter, then I will of course, carry the mobile  and I will even try to remember to switch the thing on.

 Then there are clearly thousands of people who are just burning with things they simply have to chatter to other people about – and hundreds of friends just longing to know where the mobile user is, if he or she has just gone through a tunnel, what she said to him last night or he to her, or what they are planning to have for their tea.  Very few of my friends – indeed, none that I can bring to mind – would be the slightest bit interested and in fact, might be a bit narked if I broke into whatever they were doing to tell them what I’ve just bought in the sales. In any case, they usually keep theirs in their car, too, if they have a mobile at all.

Then, I am getting old and so, sadly, there aren’t that many of them to ring. Probably for much the same reason, my age, I can’t understand why people are happy to share their private conversations with others, or happy to wander the streets apparently talking to themselves.

If I want to know about something, I can wait till I get home and look it up then – and I don’t need a camera in the run of things. We gave up taking photos years ago, when we stopped liking what we saw when we looked at ourselves and when the big old storage chest got full.

Anyway, back to the Discovery Centre. Thank you to the staff and  to the lovely people who stopped for a chat about my books – I was especially delighted by those who told me how much they had enjoyed the first one, ‘Someday, Maybe’ and, of course, those who were kind enough to buy a copy of the new one, ‘Moving On’!