My primitive pay-as-you-go mobile is now eccentric enough to mark me out as different – besides it making modern life more and more difficult. So now I intend to catch up
This year Father Christmas emulated that other bearded moralist, Moses, in that he came bearing tablets. I was quite surprised at how many people still hadn't got one until now. I hadn't got one, and still haven't, but everyone else on the early morning train from Edinburgh to London this week appeared to have one. Admittedly it was a first-class carriage (I was on a press ticket) so you'd expect all the onboard executives to be tooled up with electronics. Most had two smartphones and a laptop as well as the tablet.
The chap opposite me was evidently receiving a string of vexing emails on his tablet, interspersed with the occasional, more soothing one. But he was becoming increasingly angry. I thought: "Even though it's barely breakfast time, this man is engaged in perilous negotiation. Perhaps his whole business is on the line." When I got up to go to the loo, I glanced over his shoulder, and saw that he was playing a game where you had to balance one virtual ball on top of another.
The train was late into King's Cross, and as the man opposite rounded up his gizmos, he said: "You'll be putting in for a 50% refund on your ticket, I assume? There's an app for it." I nodded non-committally. Inside my jacket pocket nestled my shameful secret: a primitive, pay-as-you-go mobile that is a stranger to all apps. Like a drug dealer, I have owned a string of disposable phones. I sometimes think the ones I buy are not so much for sale, as displayed in shops to represent the evolutionary starting point of mobile phones. My present phone was a reasonably good buy considering it was free (on the condition that I bought £10 of top-up credit). The features of this phone include the ability to make phone calls; it also sends and receives text messages, or so I assume, but I never do that; and it has a torch or, as the menu irritatingly has it, "flashlight".
It will be apparent that I am a technophobe, and my New Year's resolution is to stop being one. I have had a number of wake-up calls this year. For a start, my tape recorder packed up. It didn't so much break as retire, leaving my shoebox full of cassettes looking distinctly passé. My local video-rental store closed down, and it became impossible to park in the West End without sending a text message to Westminster council. While doing the latest of the many money transfers I have requested this year, the cashier at my local Barclays said: "Mr Martin, as of 1 January you must have online banking."
I had thought I might be given a smartphone for Christmas, having overheard one of my sons say to my wife, around mid-December: "He certainly doesn't need an iPhone 5." That would be on the grounds that some dead people receive more phone calls than me. I also receive fewer emails than anyone I know: it's down to about four a day. I have to work at this. Having realised some years ago that anyone I did business with proposed sending me about two emails a week for the rest of my – or their – life, I took to sending stroppy replies along the lines of: "Will you please stop sending me your bloody emails?" Then one of them coolly responded: "Have you tried unsubscribing?" I took to unsubscribing in a big way. If I have a hobby, it's unsubscribing from mailing lists; it's like crushing cockroaches.
An iPhone 5 having been ruled out, I had thought I might be in line for an iPhone 4 (I have been reading about these things, you see), or perhaps a BlackBerry. My wife swears by her BlackBerry. With it, she says, she can get the internet anywhere, and this is "because it has 3G". "What is 3G?" I asked her. She couldn't exactly say.
Having figured out that I would not be getting any sort of phone for Christmas, I took matters into my own hands on Christmas Eve. I visited a phone shop and asked to view an iPhone. As I tried, and failed, to type using the on screen keyboard, the assistant said nothing, not even, "You'll soon get the hang of it," still less, "Let it feel the heat of your thumbs," a touchingly humane instruction given by someone who once let me have a go on their iPhone. The assistant was in fact remarkably astringent for a salesman, and when I asked, "Has it got 3G? I've been told you can get a connection absolutely anywhere with 3G," he barked: "Who told you that?" I could see that the true answer would be unlikely to impress him, so I said: "Just … seems to be the consensus.""Who told you?" he demanded ferociously. "My wife," I said lamely, and he scowled at me for a while, before explaining that 3G was merely an internet speed which would be of no use if you didn't have network coverage, and which had in any case been outstripped by 4G.
Of course, the techies will always be one step ahead. At the start of my journalistic career in the late 1980s, I won a prize for an essay about how newspaper offices were tyrannised by the patronising blokes of the computer department. ("It's ctrl-alt-9, like I told you before.") I believed that the means of producing any given article was becoming more important than the article itself, and I don't think I was wrong about that. Shortly afterwards, I interviewed a team of "futurologists" at BT. "The whole trend," I was assured, "will be towards simplification. You will just have a box with no visible controls on it. It will be voice-activated and it will do whatever you tell it." So far, the whole trend has been towards complication, as in "Log on to the BBC website to find out about all the ways you can listen to Radio 4."
My technophobia was underscored by writing historical novels, invoking a world without McDonald's, manmade fibres, plastic or fluorescent lighting. This work reflected my view of postwar Britain as a country beset by a post-imperial midlife-crisis, a glib neophilia; hence the destruction of our Victorian city centres and our industrial capacity.
But I am losing my nerve. When I meet people who have a mobile phone as basic as mine, they'll indulge in a bit of mock-Luddite banter ("Got this in a pound shop … No extra features but the date and time, and they don't work"). But it usually turns out they're expert texters, purists who don't like predictive texting, just as good drivers prefer a manual car to an automatic. They have one foot in modernity anyway. I'll meet a man who smokes a pipe … but it turns out he designs websites for a living; or a woman who plays the lute … but she blogs about it. You might say Stephen Fry was a fogey (tweed jackets, always banging on about opera) but he is also an expert on smartphones, as he is on everything else. He has the right idea in combining old and new, like Fulgence Bienvenüe, who built the all-electric Paris Metro, yet lit his house by candles because they're beautiful. So I intend to get up to speed in 2014. I will buy a smartphone, and when travelling by train I will leave it prominently on the table in front of me. That way I'll cease to feel self-conscious about my technophobia. I will blend in. To put it another way, I trust that among the properties of this wondrous device will be the ability to make me invisible.
Andrew Martin's latest novel is Night Train to Jamalpur Reported by guardian.co.uk 50 minutes ago.
This year Father Christmas emulated that other bearded moralist, Moses, in that he came bearing tablets. I was quite surprised at how many people still hadn't got one until now. I hadn't got one, and still haven't, but everyone else on the early morning train from Edinburgh to London this week appeared to have one. Admittedly it was a first-class carriage (I was on a press ticket) so you'd expect all the onboard executives to be tooled up with electronics. Most had two smartphones and a laptop as well as the tablet.
The chap opposite me was evidently receiving a string of vexing emails on his tablet, interspersed with the occasional, more soothing one. But he was becoming increasingly angry. I thought: "Even though it's barely breakfast time, this man is engaged in perilous negotiation. Perhaps his whole business is on the line." When I got up to go to the loo, I glanced over his shoulder, and saw that he was playing a game where you had to balance one virtual ball on top of another.
The train was late into King's Cross, and as the man opposite rounded up his gizmos, he said: "You'll be putting in for a 50% refund on your ticket, I assume? There's an app for it." I nodded non-committally. Inside my jacket pocket nestled my shameful secret: a primitive, pay-as-you-go mobile that is a stranger to all apps. Like a drug dealer, I have owned a string of disposable phones. I sometimes think the ones I buy are not so much for sale, as displayed in shops to represent the evolutionary starting point of mobile phones. My present phone was a reasonably good buy considering it was free (on the condition that I bought £10 of top-up credit). The features of this phone include the ability to make phone calls; it also sends and receives text messages, or so I assume, but I never do that; and it has a torch or, as the menu irritatingly has it, "flashlight".
It will be apparent that I am a technophobe, and my New Year's resolution is to stop being one. I have had a number of wake-up calls this year. For a start, my tape recorder packed up. It didn't so much break as retire, leaving my shoebox full of cassettes looking distinctly passé. My local video-rental store closed down, and it became impossible to park in the West End without sending a text message to Westminster council. While doing the latest of the many money transfers I have requested this year, the cashier at my local Barclays said: "Mr Martin, as of 1 January you must have online banking."
I had thought I might be given a smartphone for Christmas, having overheard one of my sons say to my wife, around mid-December: "He certainly doesn't need an iPhone 5." That would be on the grounds that some dead people receive more phone calls than me. I also receive fewer emails than anyone I know: it's down to about four a day. I have to work at this. Having realised some years ago that anyone I did business with proposed sending me about two emails a week for the rest of my – or their – life, I took to sending stroppy replies along the lines of: "Will you please stop sending me your bloody emails?" Then one of them coolly responded: "Have you tried unsubscribing?" I took to unsubscribing in a big way. If I have a hobby, it's unsubscribing from mailing lists; it's like crushing cockroaches.
An iPhone 5 having been ruled out, I had thought I might be in line for an iPhone 4 (I have been reading about these things, you see), or perhaps a BlackBerry. My wife swears by her BlackBerry. With it, she says, she can get the internet anywhere, and this is "because it has 3G". "What is 3G?" I asked her. She couldn't exactly say.
Having figured out that I would not be getting any sort of phone for Christmas, I took matters into my own hands on Christmas Eve. I visited a phone shop and asked to view an iPhone. As I tried, and failed, to type using the on screen keyboard, the assistant said nothing, not even, "You'll soon get the hang of it," still less, "Let it feel the heat of your thumbs," a touchingly humane instruction given by someone who once let me have a go on their iPhone. The assistant was in fact remarkably astringent for a salesman, and when I asked, "Has it got 3G? I've been told you can get a connection absolutely anywhere with 3G," he barked: "Who told you that?" I could see that the true answer would be unlikely to impress him, so I said: "Just … seems to be the consensus.""Who told you?" he demanded ferociously. "My wife," I said lamely, and he scowled at me for a while, before explaining that 3G was merely an internet speed which would be of no use if you didn't have network coverage, and which had in any case been outstripped by 4G.
Of course, the techies will always be one step ahead. At the start of my journalistic career in the late 1980s, I won a prize for an essay about how newspaper offices were tyrannised by the patronising blokes of the computer department. ("It's ctrl-alt-9, like I told you before.") I believed that the means of producing any given article was becoming more important than the article itself, and I don't think I was wrong about that. Shortly afterwards, I interviewed a team of "futurologists" at BT. "The whole trend," I was assured, "will be towards simplification. You will just have a box with no visible controls on it. It will be voice-activated and it will do whatever you tell it." So far, the whole trend has been towards complication, as in "Log on to the BBC website to find out about all the ways you can listen to Radio 4."
My technophobia was underscored by writing historical novels, invoking a world without McDonald's, manmade fibres, plastic or fluorescent lighting. This work reflected my view of postwar Britain as a country beset by a post-imperial midlife-crisis, a glib neophilia; hence the destruction of our Victorian city centres and our industrial capacity.
But I am losing my nerve. When I meet people who have a mobile phone as basic as mine, they'll indulge in a bit of mock-Luddite banter ("Got this in a pound shop … No extra features but the date and time, and they don't work"). But it usually turns out they're expert texters, purists who don't like predictive texting, just as good drivers prefer a manual car to an automatic. They have one foot in modernity anyway. I'll meet a man who smokes a pipe … but it turns out he designs websites for a living; or a woman who plays the lute … but she blogs about it. You might say Stephen Fry was a fogey (tweed jackets, always banging on about opera) but he is also an expert on smartphones, as he is on everything else. He has the right idea in combining old and new, like Fulgence Bienvenüe, who built the all-electric Paris Metro, yet lit his house by candles because they're beautiful. So I intend to get up to speed in 2014. I will buy a smartphone, and when travelling by train I will leave it prominently on the table in front of me. That way I'll cease to feel self-conscious about my technophobia. I will blend in. To put it another way, I trust that among the properties of this wondrous device will be the ability to make me invisible.
Andrew Martin's latest novel is Night Train to Jamalpur Reported by guardian.co.uk 50 minutes ago.