It feels exactly the same to leave my home without my phone today as it did five years ago. Or ten years ago. Or twenty years ago. This is because I don’t possess the sort of phone that I could leave home with.
Twenty-five years ago, almost everyone left home without their phone, and in the twentieth century there were no portable phones, but there were public phones in kiosks or booths all over the place and no-one left home with a phone.
Today, there are few public phones left, and so leaving home without a phone does tend to mean you can’t make a call home, or elsewhere, in an emergency. However, since few people leave home expecting to encounter an emergency, that doesn’t make you feel any different leaving home without a phone until the emergency occurs, by which time it is too late anyway.
My phone plugs into a wall socket. Until recently it did provide an emergency lifeline from home. However, my phone company (like all the others) then switched to Voice Over Internet. This also doesn’t feel too different, until you have a power cut, which happens not infrequently hereabouts, and VOI doesn’t work without electricity, so now I can’t report the power cut, and the electricity company can no longer phone old codgers like me, as they used to do during power cuts, to see if we’re all right. So that’s obviously a great leap forward for technology and evidence of social progress.
In truth, it wouldn’t make much difference if I did have a portable phone because we don’t have coverage anyhow. If I did want to make a call on such a phone, I would have to leave home, and since, at my age, an emergency is most likely to involve being unable to leave home, there wouldn’t be much point in that either.
But how does it feel setting out for a walk without a phone? It feels great. Nobody can contact me, and since I don’t want to be contacted on my walks, that’s a good thing. Actually next to nobody calls me anyway and most of the calls I get are from scammers, so I ignore the phone. Anyone who seriously wants to contact me can leave a message.
And out in the countryside, I have no need to know the latest tittle-tattle, or the FTSE index, or the footie results, or whether it is raining in the Sahara, or whatever else it seems vital for phone owners to be checking every couple of minutes. I don’t need to know what Fred had for breakfast, or where Jimmy went last night, and I don’t need to share my own activities with Fred, nor with Jimmy either, for that matter. I do carry my camera, and Murphy’s law usually dictates that I have the wrong lens on, but it doesn’t bother me all that much. Because my vision is trained to deal with the real world, and not dazzled by a screen, I can spot a tiny hoverfly on a buttercup at ten paces.
When you don’t have a phone to distract you, you notice important things. Is it raining over The Campsies? Is there cloud in the Forth Valley? Are the house martins working the field at high or low altitude? Are the buzzards operating in pairs and calling, or operating singly and being mobbed by the rooks? Are hoverflies more or less numerous than in previous years? Are there dewdrops turning spider webs into strings of jewellery? Are the stirks out in the open, or under cover in the wood? Is that really a crossbill, or are my eyes deceiving me? How many roe deer are up and about today, and where does my dog tell me the badger was last night? I could go on, but I’m sure you get the idea.
And in the quiet, you can hear yourself think, which is exactly what a writer needs to do.
Phones? As Miss Brodie used to say, “For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.”
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