When I started taking holidays abroad back in the 1980s, things were a little different to the way they are today. For one thing, you were drowning in paperwork. You had tickets, printed boarding cards, Eurocheques to change into cash when you were abroad, as well as taking a wad of cash for whichever country you were visiting. As for communications, it might as well have been the stone age. It was essentially by landline telephone or by letter or postcard. If you wanted news from back home, you could, if you were lucky, read all about it on a day old English newspaper, or if you were a Guardian reader a two day old newspaper. Essentially, you knew nothing. If things were like they were in 1985 when we landed in Bristol last night after a lovely holiday in Lanzarote, we might have been surprised to learn that Liz Truss and KamiKwasi Kwarteng were no longer in charge of trashing the country. As it was, we knew as much as most people back home.
How we take these things for granted. And it’s all because of technology. I was able to follow every aspect of Truss’s fall from disgrace as I crashed on my sun bed, listening to a selection of nearly 17,000 songs stored on my mini-computer, or phone as some refer to it. It’s not just the daily news, though. I can chat to people all over the world, see an instant weather forecast and find out to the minute whether my inbound plane to take us home is on time. Back in the day, you only found out if your plane was on time when it landed at the airport in which you were waiting.
I was of the generation which bought a newspaper, something that I continued to do until I tired of paying money to the oily far left hack Owen Jones. at the Guardian, imagining, probably unfairly, that he was trousering all my cash and it was not being shared around other journos. Now, almost no one buys newspapers, except in Lanzarote where a few elderly folk queued every morning for a dose of fascism in the Daily Mail. Even old people prefer mobile phones these days and I am a living and breathing example of that.
The only place you can’t use a mobile is on a plane, except in airplane mode. I regularly bemoan this fact until I imagine what it would be like, especially with the breed of person who holds their phone well away from their ear in order to ensure everyone can hear what the other caller is saying, too. And how irritating would it be if a four hour flight was constantly interrupted by ringtones like mine (Theme from a Summer Place) and you were constantly greeted with “I’M ON THE PLANE!” or “SORRY – I DIDN’T QUITE CATCH THAT. THE ENGINE NOISE DROWNED OUT WHAT YOU WERE SAYING – HELLO?”
Yes, people still buy newspapers, print out boarding passes, pay for things in cash just like we used to do before technology caught up and good luck to them. And I’m glad I can communicate all over the world via a computer with a bonkers 512 gigabytes. I’d have loved a house phone as a kid, never mind something as futuristic as a mobile. And a computer storing all my music, on which I can also watch TV, listen to the radio, check where my plane is. Life may have been simpler without technology but at least for me it wouldn’t be anywhere near so much fun.
