“What do you think of women playing rugby?” Clive asked me.
“I don’t think they should do it,” I replied. This was a few years ago in the bar after social tennis in London, the best part of my week. Clive had just celebrated his 80th birthday and there was women’s rugby on the TV. Progress, I’ll be told.
Clive was born right at the end of the war, his father died in service when he was an infant. North Africa I think it was. His mother raised him on her own, through rationing which didn’t end until 1954 in Britain. Clive had a hip replacement some years back but that didn’t stop him from being an excellent doubles player. Good times.
That’s my problem you see. I have more in common with 80 year old Clive than most other people. Every day is an up – at – dawn siege, for me. How I have made it to 2025 I will never know. And it will only get worse. Women should be free to play rugby, that’s the truth. I know it, Clive knows but we just don’t like watching it. It’s too modern and not feminine enough. Still, at least it is not drones.
Lord, save me from dinner being delivered by drone. That really has been my breaking point. Mind you I was heartened by the response, the majority of which agreed with me. They are an assault on the senses, privacy and all things decent. I think what annoys me most about the drones is what they stand for – namely laziness. Someone, a mother or wife, has not done her job that day and failed to make dinner. So they fly in the Chinese take away by drone. Dinner by drone, like women playing rugby or raisins in a salad, is just not right.
The drones, women’s rugby and football, the wretched mobile phones, the demise of the Good Room. It’s endless. And everyone seems to think these are all good ideas. I can assure you, they are not. With every ‘technological advance’ a part of our humanity dies. I’m convinced of that.
Why is everything ‘on demand’ now? Do you know what that does to you? On demand makes people demanding. I demand my double crust pizza be delivered to me by drone while I watch my On Demand TV. This is not progress, this is decline.
I try to explain to the children as they make endless demands for this from Amazon or that on Netflix, the way things were ‘when I was growing up.’ Listen here, I say, myself and my brother grew up watching Quantum Leap, a programme that was the best of Americana. That was an event, a bonding experience I remember to this day.
If you did not get your bottom on the couch at 9pm on Wednesday (I think) to watch Quantum Leap on BBC2 then you did not see what happened to Sam when he jumped into the Vietnam War to save his brother. My God, that was an excellent three episodes. Sam had just been to his childhood home, to see his mother, father, sister and brother one last time.
(Sam leaps from his childhood home into Vietnam to save his brother. The classic Quantum Leap.)
You had to be there, I tell the children, or you would never see that episode again. No playback, no demand, nothing. Sure, your friends might tell you about it the next day at school but that was a poor substitute. The demand was made on you to get there and watch the programme. And once it ended and left you on that cliff hanger, the second demand was made on you to be patient and wait a week, an entire week, to see the next episode. When, might I ask, are the children asked to wait a week for anything these days? Never. That’s the truth.
The challenge today is not to make things easier for ourselves but to make things harder. Cook the dinner, wait the week for the next episode, hoover the floor yourself and don’t get one of those machine things. Convenience is great, obesity, laziness and impatience are not.
And that’s before the AI comes to get us. Below is the scene that greeted us when we returned from holiday from Spain.
Customer service, allegedly, with not a single human person to take our query. We flew Aer Lingus and they are usually very good. The staff are wonderful, my husband flies with them to London for work. But they damaged the luggage and the car – seat came out in half. These things happen but when we went to lodge the complaint, it was to a machine. Progress, I’ll be told, but how many people have these machines put out of a job? It is just so impersonal.
On and on it goes. People don’t know what it is like to me, doing battle against modernity every day. I’m a regular Sarah Connor I am, fighting the machines.
(Sarah Connor finishes off the Terminator.)
I’m not saying I want to live in the 1880s but I’d take the 1980s and 1990s any day. That was the sweet spot between the modern and the outright undignified. Today, it is one long slide into decadence. It cannot end well.
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