When you’re sixty-something and heading towards another birthday, it doesn’t take much to disappear into one more daydream before the big cliff arrives.
The other day I caught my two oldest grandkids, aged seven and nine, peering intently at a mobile phone screen and giggling.
Horrified at what they might have discovered floating in the vast and polluted Oceania Digitalis, I asked them what they were doing.
They replied they were making a stop-motion video using Lego figures. This one was called the “Extremely Famous Chicken Crash Rescue” and involved a chicken driving a race car to find a shiny thing it had spotted when looking through its Super Goggles with 1000x magnification.
Of course.
This is a 21st-century digital childhood and their stop-motion movie was going to be bigger than Barbie. It’s not the adventures of Noddy and Mr Plod in a cardboard book anymore. Silly me.
At that point I could have disappeared into a comforting reverie about the innocent joys of my Enid Blyton childhood before those limp-wristed latte-sipping woke lefties destroyed it all.
But I didn’t.
Instead, my grandkids’ excitement at using a mobile phone for the first time sent me down a tunnel of wonder at just how ever-present these things now are.
If someone asked me what is the single thing that has had the most profound effect on the human race in my lifetime, I would have to say it’s the mobile phone.
If someone told me as a teenager that by the time I turned 60 I would have a hand-held device giving me access to the entire sum of human knowledge, as well as endless funny cat videos, at my fingertips I would have told them to get off the drugs.
Although mobile phones only appeared during the last third of my life so far, it is now virtually impossible to imagine life without them.
Before mobile phones — or BMP for the cultural historians among us — a journey anywhere beyond your home town involved taking a paper map that unfolded like a piece of origami. A car breakdown on the highway meant you faced death from speeding traffic on a hike of several kilometres to the nearest phone box to request help. A calculation of anything beyond a shopping bill meant using an abacus or a piece of paper and a pencil for long division and a knowledge of squiggly symbols. A pub argument about the date of the moon landing meant a visit to the local library. Checking your bank balance meant joining a queue at your local bank or finding the nearest ATM. All this can now be settled with a swipe of your phone screen while video-calling your son on a trek through Patagonia.
And what on earth did we do during those lost “nothing” moments of waiting for the kettle to boil or the toast to brown, or waiting for a bus or a train to arrive, or the doctor to see you? I honestly can’t remember, but I think we did nothing. We stared into space and waited for life to begin again.
Because I don’t like to throw anything away that once held value, I have a kitchen drawer full of mobile phones. Flip phones, qwerty keyboard phones, text and email phones and big-screen phones. They could now make a museum display of the acceleration of human communication in the first two decades of the 21st century.
I remember seeing a fellow in the Maude St Mall circa 1998 walking around talking into a brick-sized phone. I summed him up as a brick-brained show-off. Two years later I was doing the same with a red Nokia 3310. In another two years I was sending and receiving emails on my phone. When smartphones and internet connection arrived five years later things got faster as people prodded, pinched and swiped their screens to find news and cat videos, maps and cheese recipes, and the history of the entire world. When music streaming arrived my vinyl and CD collection became redundant overnight.
My dear old mum died just before the dawn of the mobile phone age. I can still picture her sitting in her lounge chair knitting and looking out the window waiting for the next phone call, or letter in the post box with photos from her children.
She would have just loved the idea of instant conversations and images from her loved ones. It might have given her another five years.
Among the warnings of digital doom-scrolling and rivers of mindless trivia, it’s worth remembering the wondrous value of mobile phones, and what life was like before they arrived.