Accordion to what I was told by the morning newsbots recently, it’s now fifty earth years since the introduction of sliced white bread into the daily lives of a grateful nation. This means, of course, that a mere child of the early-to-mid sixties like myself has never known a time in its life when bread didn’t come in its convenient pre-sliced form, and, whilst I am obviously still happy to buy my bread in its pure, unsliced form, my default purchasing option has inevitably become the sliced loaf in a bag.
I blame the parents…
However, I do have a slight admiration for those mechanical devices, which I think I first saw in France but are now fairly ubiquitous in bakeries wherever I go, the bread slicing machine. Take a fresh baked loaf, ask the customer whether and how they want it sliced and watch it go. I could probably watch it all day, if that wouldn’t annoy absolutely everyone in the queue behind me and end up with me having to throw an awful lot of bread away.
So, why then is the not-so-new innovation of the sliced loaf taxing my braincell today? Well, apart from the obvious question that has been so often asked before during the course of the past half century, which is, of course “What exactly was the best thing before sliced bread?” (I’m guessing tinned food…), I feel another need to quote from that famous essay “How to stop worrying and learn to love the internet” by Douglas Adams in the Sunday Times (29 August 1999), which I always seem to be coming back to:-
- Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
- Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
- Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.
Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are. (Here’s the link to the whole essay, if you’re interested http://bit.ly/1V3v4s)
There are so many things in the world today that I can’t really see the point of - Wars, Famine, Weapons of Mass Destruction – but about which most people (apart from those with a declared interest in the outcome of such things, many with their fingers in a particularly unpleasant pie), probably agree with me, but then there are the other things that people get so very excited about but which I can’t really see the need for.
I can just about understand why people feel the need to carry a portable telephone around with them, even if it turns out that it is actually slow-cooking their brains. The ability to let someone know that you are actually on the train and that it is about to go into a tunnel is possibly one of the biggest advances for mankind since we bothered to stick around on a beach one morning rather than staying in the ocean dancing around with all the other amoebas, and even some of the other jiggery-pokery that we attach to the things sometimes actually seems useful, although I am still more of the opinion that if I want to take a photograph I will use a camera, and if anyone should wish to ring me, there are a number of places I can usually be found and the rest of the time I would probably prefer to be doing what I was doing instead of talking about it to someone who is not there. However, mobile telephony is progress, and I’m beginning to learn to live with it. (Note to self: Try and learn to see the point of those phone apps that tell everyone where you are all the time and that your house is probably empty.)
What really troubles me is this constant need and necessity to “update” things all the time. We have a youth culture that is blaming older generations for wrecking the planet for them but then can’t make the connection that throwing away your telephone after three months because it’s no longer the latest or trendiest model is, quite simply, devastating in terms of its environmental footprint, even if you do hand in the old one for recycling. If something is working perfectly well, why change it? I know that it is in certain company’s interests to keep on updating their operating systems so that people have to keep on buying their new stuff just to keep up (and that’s a whole new trick being played upon us that we have still haven’t been wise enough to see through…), but it really is only a generation or so since people could maintain and repair their own cars rather than paying out £500 just for a “diagnostic”, or take a television to a shop and actually get it repaired, or have sturdy, reliable old “radiograms” that they treasured and loved for decades and sometimes even handed down to their offspring.
Meanwhile, the all-consuming march of the video games carries on, smashing all other forms of entertainment out of its path as it goes. Games get launched with much the same sort of fanfare as feature films used to, with even more possibilities for sucking more cash out of you. Then hours and hours are spent in the truly wholesome pursuits of shooting at zombies, blowing up buildings and pretending that we’re doing exercise or learning to paint whilst the real world beyond the double glazing is just waiting to be explored. Crikey! I can’t even settle down to read a book now without someone trying to persuade me that I would be better off reading it from some gadget or other.
One of the most depressing hours I have endured recently was spent watching “The Gadget Show” on Channel Five, waiting for a potentially interesting piece on which compact cameras were considered to be the “best” option. Watching a group of very strange folk obsessing about all manner of the latest “tech” (their word) just seemed so manifestly soul-destroying that I started to feel more and more depressed as the minutes ticked by on my cheap – and manifestly uncool - wristwatch.
I’m no Luddite. I can truly appreciate the advances that technology has made into making all our lives a lot easier. Medical equipment has photographed and scanned parts of my body that I’m still not convinced are really there, and my so-called “living” is earned by wrangling a steam-powered early variant of the equipment that they were getting so excited about, and even the cup of coffee that sits cooling on my desk as I type out these ravings was created thanks to one of the many electronic gizmos that clutter up our kitchen.
But this “cult of having stuff” – and much of it actually pretty pointless stuff at that - seems to be getting out of control. There’s loads of stuff we might want, and some of it that we might actually need, but the vast majority of today’s “must haves” are tomorrow’s rubbish, and we’ll be wondering why on earth we ever bought them.
Meanwhile, I saw a poster the other day which told me that I could have two of Apple’s latest “must haves” for the princely sum of £99, if I was prepared to part with “only” £69 a month for the contract to run them. Maybe I have got so far out of the loop that I don’t understand how the world works, but, if we’ve got to the stage where those kinds of sums are considered mere triflings (and I hate to think what you have to do if you have one, two or more ankle-biters making demands upon your wallet for such accessories) then I’m obviously not earning enough.
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