I'm a snail

I get laughed at quite a lot – mainly by my closest relatives, but increasingly by the Bots – because I don’t like apps. I don’t want to live my life through the glare of a smart phone. I don’t want to have to refer to a little pocket-world every time I want to do something. If I owe you money is it OK for you to hang-on until I am at home and can log onto my computer? (I hope your house won’t be repossessed during the lengthy wait.) Is it OK to tap my real-life-plastic-Boots-loyalty card on the machine rather than go through pages of multicoloured apps on the phone?

My Boots/Nectar/Superdrug/M&S/Tesco loyalty cards are vintage items. Specimens from a pre-smart-phone-era, and work perfectly well. Oh wait, it didn’t go through? Wait, my phone needs to see my face. Enter passcode. Hang on. Can you do it again? Sorry.

The Self-Serve-Till-Bot gets annoyed with me at the “do you have a loyalty card?” moment because It has to wait while I get out my purse (yes I still use one) and shuffle through various cards and present It with a faded bar-code on a battered rectangle of plastic; I hear It tittering with the other Till-Bots as It watches me – 52-years of greying-wrinkled-drooping-imperfect-humanness – get my card out “Look!” It sneers to the other Till-Bots, “another one of those stupid humanoid App-Deniers! How quaint! How dinosaur! I’m going to mess with her head now and flash some error lights to add to her general confusion!”. The Bots crease over in silent Botty Hysteria. A human shop assistant helps me finalise the transaction with a pitying look. I refuse to feel shame. But also I obviously feel shame, scuttling out, clasping my retro loyalty card.

There’s part of me that wants to be modern and slick and really on-board with all the new-fangled tech of today. Life at my finger-tips. Efficiency and brilliance. A smooth-cruise. To have the answers. Yeah.

But there’s a bigger part of me that holds up both hands and wants to push back. Why the rush? Why does everything have to be in such a goddamned rush? What’s wrong with having £1.50 in your pocket, getting out of the car, going to the machine, cursing at how complicated it is, coming back to the car with a crumpled ticket and then going to the shops? (Small confession here, I do have Ringo. Proper life-safer.) Do I actually need every single local take-away-restaurants’- menu on tap? Do I need to have a global-sized-jumble-sale at my beck-and-call (Vinted)? Is buying clothes a sensible use of time whilst sitting in the doctors waiting room? What about the joy and frustration of going to a shop (even a slightly smelly second-hand shop!) and rummaging through rails, touching the material, holding it up against yourself in front of the mirror? Trying on glamorous shoes that you know you absolutely don’t need as you never go to parties that warrant such a fabulous pair of high-heels, but you can’t try on glamorous shoes if they’re an image on an app.

Mind improving word games to stave off dementia?

Qualifying your body’s health via the daily data on your screen?Am I fit enough? My app says I climbed more stairs last year.

Am I tired?  The app says my REM was below average last night. I must be tired.

Every newspaper ever published behind a little button revealing what grim event took place 2 minutes ago or what piece of shit ruling Trump has made. Is it vital to know minutes after these happenings? I don’t think that helps me feel happy. I don’t feel like I’m missing out if I discover someone did something sordid a few hours later than the rest of the world…

Back in the golden days one might buy a printed paper from the local newsagents, along with a packet of Polos and a second-class stamp for the thankyou letter to Granny, come home, sit for 20-minutes, read the headlines from what happened the day before, contemplate the awfulness of politicians and criminals, put the paper away in the light-the-fire-pile, and then get on with the days necessary chores. (Visit the bank, deposit a cheque; go to the grocers for some vegetables, hit the butchers for some sausages, trot off to the independent book shop to find a new cook book…) It all took a bit longer. And in the process of doing those chores, it was likely that one might also bump into someone one knew – in the queue for sausages, or over the carrots in the veg-shop. It was all quite slow and human.

I know my thinking is daft, illogical and probably describes an unnecessary paranoia about living in an age of technology, and I know that I am sounding exceedingly Boomer, but having been laughed at by a young relative recently for having WIND DOWN WINDOWS in our car, I have been mulling this over a lot. I like the circular motion of winding down my own car window. And you know what? I’m dreading when the time comes and a new car has to be bought because the fucker will be no doubt run by a fucking app from our phones. Speed up slow coach!

This isn't a Dolly tribute

Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen, Pour myself a cup of ambition.
Oh Dolly. Should I write a long flowery tribute about how Dolly changed my life? It seems a bit late now and there have been massive outpourings which really do the job splendidly, and my life wasn’t really changed by Dolly except only for a few short days when I was maybe 10 years old. I found myself on stage (not somewhere I have frequented often) doing a ‘skit’ for a school show where me and a couple of friends danced to 9-to-5 with our hair tucked into headscarfs and old fashioned mops in our hands. Aged 10 we wouldn’t have known much about working 9-to-5 but it seemed like a jolly song to have a dance to. We thought cleaning was funny. (I don’t now, obviously, as I look regretfully at my un-mopped floor and cobwebbed windows.)

Remembering this Dolly moment did get me thinking a little bit, especially after having very recently re-watched Sliding Doors. (Gwenny with an incredibly strained English accent, John Hannah incredibly irritating with every line.) Back in the 80s I did a lot of dancing at school – in a relatively un-self-conscious and definitely not ambitious way. I just loved it. Stretching out (short! I was very small) limbs, our dance teacher clicking a rhythm through his teeth and fingers, our collective bodies clad in 1980s leotards and legwarmers, we’d choreograph routines and occasionally perform for an assembly or maybe even a parents-day. It was a very comfortable space. Somewhere I felt confident and possibly even something I could consider myself good at. In the classroom I wasn’t any of those things. So I danced. And at some point the dancing ended because when we all went up to senior school dancing wasn’t available (unless you did it out of school but that was difficult being at a boarding school, and it was ballet that was offered, not contemporary - which was what I loved, and who would take us anyway?). And whilst I was at a school which celebrated ‘the arts’ it seemed that back then, late 80s, dance wasn’t really included in this category. Not for children in a rural boarding school, anyway. So it fizzled out and my red-and-white leotard was pushed to the back of my drawers. And I lost touch with that little dancer and got into learning how to drink Bacardi and smoke cigs without being busted (which actually I did a good job of as I never was busted, I could confidently call myself extremely good at lurking in the shadows not being noticed by suspicious teachers).

My Sliding Doors thinking rewinds me to being that 11/12-year-old and being offered a life of dance… what would that have looked like? To have been encouraged and supported and allowed to be ambitious? It’s very likely I would’ve given up anyway in my mid-teens (according to research, girls are most likely to give up sports in their teens), but if dance had been there – taken seriously, pushed for, given value, would I have carried on? Could I have ‘made it’ – become a professional and stag-leaped my way around regional theatres with a small company, multiple pairs of legwarmers, poorly paid but loving life on the road?

In Sliding Doors Gwenny’s character discovers her shithead boyfriend in bed with another woman and so she dumps him, cuts her hair, starts a new company and aces at life, until she’s hit by a car and dies. The other Gwenny character doesn’t discover the boyfriends infidelity because she missed the tube and gets mugged and then wears plaits in her hair so we know which character is which. And when she is hit by the same van she doesn’t die but she’s learned about life in a different way and dumps her shithead boyfriend and pulls through stronger than ever. There’s a message there for us. (Don't cut your hair?)

My Sliding Doors scenario wouldn't be quite so dramatic and end in death. But I do wonder, especially when I get twitchy-body at the sound of certain tunes, what I could’ve been. I suppose we are all prone to thinking about what could’ve been and the aim is to not live with regret over past decisions or lack of choice, especially if we didn't even know they even existed, but to be the conductor of our own opportunities looking ahead.

Meanwhile my creaking and cracking 52 year old body actually is quietly pleased to not be flinging itself around a dance floor as I nurse a repetitive strain injury on one side (from watering the garden with bath-water during the drought, up and down stairs with a heavy watering can for weeks) and a bruised rotator cuff on the other side (I had a fall in December!). Each morning I wake up – I quite literally do tumble out of bed (Dolly didn’t even write this song during the menopause!) because overnight my joints have seized up like some rusty old bike left out overnight in the rain.

Talking of which (rain that is, not my rusty joints) how nice it is to see a cloud in the sky and a shoot of green grass poking through what had increasingly looked like a sheet of brown concrete but was actually the garden.  

 

Oh for a ceiling fan

 All this heat… lying on bed (no longer in bed) gently sweating into the sheets, staring at the ceiling wishing there was a fan twirling the air around the room… god it’s hot. How does it feel hotter when the sun goes down? My house, ancient, wasn’t built in an era when it hit 35-degrees for weeks on end. As an old butchers, the meat hooks and bars for hanging giant carcasses off (nice) do nothing to keep the rooms cool. So I lie on bed gently sweating into the sheets. 

The lack of a ceiling fan reminds me of a time in my life when I lived in a house that did have ceiling fans… over in Seikong - Hong Kong mainland - when Dad was posted there with the army in the 80s. I was 7-8 years old and we lived in a jungly army bungalow enclave on the side of a hill, mosquito screens on all the windows and large clunking ceiling fans swirling muggy air around quite a dark house. I remember my bedroom was a sort of lean-to-add-on to the side of my brothers room, and in it I had a tiny little cassette player where I played, continuously, a tape of Beatles music. Can’t buy me love. I also had a collection of Sindy dolls. (Note, not Barbies, which was always the aspiration.) They had shiny dresses, plastic shoes, handbags that didn’t open, hair that could melt if left too long in the sun, disproportionately long skinny limbs… and a male version - who’s name I don’t even know - of which I had 1 doll - a bit puny and underwhelming in equally shiny clothing but with helmet-hair rather than ‘real’ locks. My brothers had some kind of male doll thing too which had a more army-like appearance and when they returned to HK from the UK on the B-Cal flights exporting all the children who boarded to and from school 3 times a year, they would be reunited with these slightly dubious alpha male specimens. 

One time, we became particularly fevered - the word feral works too - and hysterical and created a game, which would be a one-time-only game, given the nature of this invention. The idea was to put the ceiling fan on full-blast - it would make this thwump-thwump noise that got faster and faster as the blades went round and round - dizzying… - At which point we decided the best thing to do would be to throw the dolls into the whizzing blades and see what happened. Total-carnage-mayhem! Bits of Sindy and her boyfriend brutally shredded as they hit the rotators - then peeeeeewwwweeeewwww - they ricochet in parts all over our bedroom - whack splat thwack! Shoes - zoom! Overly-long-leg - weeeeeehhheeee! Our eyes manic with destructive pleasure we would re-chuck the (poor) dolls back in as they became increasingly dismembered and mangled. The grand finale would have been Sindy’s head coming off like a champagne cork and flying across the beds and landing with a thud in a dark cockroachy corner of the room. It was all over very quickly. I kept the clothes but the dolls didn’t make it and had to be dispatched of all together. I think it was worth the moment of stomach-clutching-out-of-control-laughter this gave us at a time when we didn’t see each other all that much (them at boarding school in Sussex, me at the local army school in Hong Kong). It didn’t resolve the issue of the extreme humidity either but was an excellent distraction. 


Thinking about this time in Hong Kong I know now we were living in a different world era, Hong Kong was relatively un-developed, and we would head off, when my brothers were home for the holidays, on adventures on the Ghurka Junk - an incredible wooden boat (seemed enormous to me when I was only 7) that the regiment owned - picture a Chinese boat in your mind and this is what the junk was, full of curves. We’d go off on the junk, the boat being driven (sailed, I guess) by Ghurka soldiers who were so handsome and so kind and patient with us (were we nightmare bratty children who they had to put up with? God I hope not) and smiled with such warmth it could make me cry now just thinking about their kindness and how Dad would talk so fluently and unselfconsciously in this beautiful Nepali language, chuckling at some joke or other. And Mum would put this insane suncream on our noses which was like a strip of thick white paint that would last for hours and later make me think about Adam Ant. We would have a massive picnic - I think cooked by someone in the regiment - maybe some curries - delicious, so normal to have curry for lunch on a massive beautiful boat in unspoiled waters - and splash about in warm clear sea around Plover Cove (I wonder if that even exists any more) - watch out for the lethal jelly-fish (man-o-war!) and home as the sun set, feeling warm and crunchy from the salt water. And then the long drive home back up ‘twist’ the terrifying road that zig-zagged up behind Kowloon where Dad would try his best not to kill us while overtaking on blind corners in a bid to get past some sputtering diesel fumes of an ancient 3-wheel motor. 

It’s funny where the mind wonders when you’re staring at the ceiling sweating gently into your sheets wishing you had a fan. Thwump thwump.