THE BEST THING SINCE…?

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.

But then again, is anybody? After all, even a sliced loaf costs an arm and a leg these days. It must be all those development costs. Although, if I was starving, at least I could eat the bread, which is more than I can say for a rinky-dinky mobile phone, however many “apps” it may have.

FALSE MEMORIES, OLD BOOKS, FONTS & “THE BRIG”

A few evenings ago, here in the heart of Lesser Blogfordshire, we were discussing books (as you do) and the story got around to Umberto Eco and what a cracking book I remember “Foucoult’s Pendulum” as having been. This led me to a vague memory that we’d bought a later book of his, but I couldn’t for the life of me think what it was. In fact I was utterly convinced that it wasn’t me that even bought it, but, in the end it turns out that I was wrong about that. These “false memories” they do start to come back and bite you. I think it’s the long ago dreams and worries you had blurring with reality as they get further away. I’ve got enough real bad memories to have to deal with without my wretched subconscious making up new ones for me to fret over. I have vivid memories of returning to a previous job long after I’d left for a few Saturdays just to help them out, although I know I never went back there (although there’s still the slight nagging irritation whenever I run into anyone from that place that I never actually got paid for the work...).

Completely vivid.

Never happened.

So when my mother told me that my clear memories of one of her previous cleaners losing one of her keys to the flat never happened, maybe she was right after all. I’ve claimed for years that I don’t actually dream – I certainly don’t have any that I remember – but maybe this is how they manifest themselves.

Anyway, returning to Umberto Eco, the title of whose book of essays “Travels in Hyper-reality” suddenly seems quite appropriate for these ramblings today, I did track down my pristine and unread copy of his novel “Baudelino” and, judging by the receipt tucked inside its pages (yes, I am that kind of a guy…) it turned out that I did indeed buy it, alongside a book about “The Sweeney” (of all things) way, way back in October 2003, getting on for eight years ago. A very long time to be in possession of a book that I was desperate to read when I bought it, and then to not actually read it.

Sometimes I think I buy too many books.

Meanwhile, there’s been a lot of talk recently, since the coming of the iPad and the Kindle (other e-readers are of course available) about the death of the book. The news media would have us believe that the book is a dying format, but then they’re always so very eager to jump onto the bandwagon of the “next big thing” (probably because they want to justify the fact that they’ve all bought all the latest gadgets themselves) and I do rather believe that the book will survive as a format long after we’ve filled our landfill with our discarded e-readers when the next thing comes along.

I love buying books, although I buy rather fewer than I used to because I don’t find the time to read quite as often as I once did, and there’s nothing to compare with finding a crisp new book about a subject that I’m keen on and which I didn’t even know had been published sitting on a pile of perfect and unsullied copies in a bookshop. I love having my books around me, too, even though it means that the house suffers from the kind of clutter that would make Estate Agents and Interior Designers weep. I find it hard to get rid of them, suffering as I do from a need occasionally to track down some piece of prose or other that I know that I read somewhere. I can lose whole weekends to that particular quirk. A love of books can change your life, and not just because a bit of learning can change it. I was briefly involved with someone who didn’t like the smell of old books. It didn’t last, but I know that the books will.

I wasn’t really convinced by the “save the trees” environmental arguments that I read in favour of the e-reader, because, like battery operated cars, one advantage seems to be countered by the manufacture of the product itself. Nor do I believe that the technology won’t  continue to progress leaving these devices to be thrown onto the scrapheap of history when the next development arrives. Someone did mention the e-reader “app” on their particular mobile telephonic device, but when I looked into the details of such a thing, I couldn’t imagine reading a book on such a tiny screen is quite the same thing at all, and I don’t really feel that the argument that you can carry a whole library of books around with you is a valid one as well. I’ve seldom wanted to read more than two books at a time in my life, and, unless you’re doing research, I can’t imagine why anyone else would need to, either. If the book itself is gripping enough, surely you’d want to finish it rather than read a page or two of this and that every so often? They're just not the same kind of things as magazines, are they? But I know that anything that actually gets people reading again is probably a good thing, although I wish we were fighting harder to save our libraries.

Then there is the “reading in the bath” argument in favour of the battered old paperback, although personally, I tend to read my books very carefully, in less perilous environments, and sometimes after I've finished them, they sit on the shelves looking as if they’ve never been touched at all, which is why I’ll probably turn into a nervous wreck if I ever lend you one. Nonetheless, books might very well be lo-tech and comparatively bulky but I could lend them to people, or donate them to charity without too much trouble, which I think might not turn out to be so simple on an electronic device.

And of course we should never forget that most of what we know about the history of humanity is because it was written in books, on those lovely pages of vellum and parchment that have survived from the medieval times, and on the papyrus scrolls from even earlier than that. If we transfer the sum of all human knowledge onto systems more vulnerable to things like electromagnetic pulses and so forth, we may lose a lot more than just knowledge. we may lose our entire sense of history. I still remember that scene in one of the “Mad Max” films where the child is able to use a lo-tech needle to hear the voices captured on a vinyl LP. If the barbarians do finally storm the gates and we descend into a new dark age, we’re going to need to relearn a heck of a lot of knowledge to knock ourselves up a laser beam just to be able to read something. Especially if it’s something like the manual for knocking up a laser beam...

But a book?

Why, any child can pick up a book and find a world within just waiting for them to explore it.

Meanwhile, although only loosely related to matters of the page, I think I’ve finally finished my tinkering with the layouts of my Lesser Blogfordshire pages, and I hope that they are now much simpler to navigate around. This is probably all due to my (still) current reading about fonts, “Just my Type” (a book which is rapidly becoming an all-time favourite of mine). I think I might have erroneously described it before as being about typography, but it is mostly about fonts. I’ve finally, after a brief dalliance with Times New Roman, settled upon Georgia for the body copy, which Matthew Carter designed for Microsoft as a serif companion to the sans-serif Verdana to create a crisp and clear font for reading on screen, and, despite my usual resistance to all things overtly corporate, I have to grudgingly admit to what a beautiful font it is.

Enjoy.

Finally, my morning took a turn for the positively miserable when I found out that another of the cornerstones of my childhood, the rather wonderful Mr. Nicholas Courtney who played the rather magnificent Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge Stewart  in “Doctor Who” throughout the days when Jon Pertwee played the Time Lord, but for many years before and afterwards too, had passed from this mortal realm. Once again, I must raise my metaphorical glass (I seem to be doing this an awful lot of late), probably this time containing a pint of real ale, to his fond memory…

(Transfers pint to other hand, and salutes).