I used to love getting the train. Hard as it is to believe, because I'm aware I come across as a sprightly young thing, but when I first started regular rail travel not all that many people had mobile phones, and even if they did they hardly used them. Nobody had personal music players, or if they did they played them extremely quietly. Most people just read books or newspapers on the train, or they'd sit with their heads back and their mouths open as they snored softly away, or they'd stare out of the windows with blank looks on their faces and you could just sit and watch people and wonder what it was they might be thinking about, coming up with all kinds of mad scenarios for them to be journeying to. Or was that just me?
Yeah, yeah. I'm doing that "old person" thing where I make something that's always probably been a bit crap sound idyllic...a bit like my Nan when she says the time of bombs and rationing was the best in her life. But I'm sure train journeys were less irritating ten-odd years ago. Yesterday I was coming home from Oxford, and as it was the middle of the day I was looking forward to a stress-free train journey back home, out of rush hour. I had a book with me; I was looking forward to reading it in peace. Surely at 2:10pm or thereabouts, the train wouldn't be that busy?
And so it wasn't - but the people on the train must have been the noisiest bunch I've ever travelled with. Two men in suits got on and sat in the seats in front of me, going on about share prices in extra-loud braying voices. Then a student got on (or at least she looked like a student) with her iPod on full blast, so loud that I could hear the Lady Gaga album she was listening to as though I'd just put it on myself as background music. Then a skinny man in jeans low-slung enough to hardly warrant wearing them in the first place shuffled on, shouting menacingly into his mobile phone "I'm not 'aving any of that, innit? I want it there by the time I get back, you got that? Just make sure it's there, or I'll go fucking apeshit" before moving on to making a call to his Mum about a wedding he was going to at the weekend. (Yes, you'll be pleased to hear he'd toned down his voice for the second call).
I envy people who can sleep through any amount of noise and can just switch off from anything going on around them. I am not one of these people. A hair drifts to the floor at night and I'll sit bolt upright in bed, hair like Emmett Brown from Back to the Future, wondering what horrors are about to happen. And if people are talking around me, or there's a dim second-heard piece of music playing through someone else's headphones, no matter how interesting it is I'll abandon everything I'm doing or thinking and listen to them instead. It's so annoying. And it's too much. One of the reasons I don't have things like iPhones or iPads or that kind of stuff is because I'm so easily distracted that I'd just never get anything done, ever (also because I slightly regard people who own all these things as a little bit poncey. Especially if I don't know them. Sorry...can't help it).
One of the reasons I was in Oxford in the first place was to see a stand-up comedy show with a friend, which was quite good, even if most of the jokes seemed to have been taken from Jerry Seinfeld's Nineties' stand-up routines. But one of the statements stuck with me. "We don't need God any more, because it's technology that's always watching; always with us" This then went on into a vaguely amusing ramble about people with iPhones that I won't repeat here because I can only remember about half of it and it won't be half as half-funny as I found it when I heard it).
A favourite book of mine when I was eleven years old was 'Letters to Growing Pains'. Growing Pains was a little section in a Saturday morning kids' TV show called 'Going Live!', which in those days everybody watched because the only other choices on offer were the news or an Open University programme about maths. Anyway, the Growing Pains section was presented by a kind looking man who read out the letters kids wrote in to him about problems with bullying at school, or bad breath, or wonky eyes, or all three, and he'd give them kind, honest and matter-of-fact solutions. And I loved the book, because it continued that gentle theme of people around my age presenting problems that could be solved with a bit of simple kindness and common-sense thought. It was a lovely, reassuring sort of book.
Recently I found my original copy of that Growing Pains book and read through it for old times' sake. I sat there wondering if Nigel from Wythenshawe ever did find a girlfriend after being cruelly dumped in a disco at 13, or if Michelle from Leicester's spots ever cleared up. But mainly I felt a bit wistful, because a book like that couldn't exist now. Now, if a kid had a B.O. problem they'd probably just look up a solution on the internet and get a myriad of dubious, faceless suggestions. An issue as formerly simple as playground bullying can't be sorted out in a kindly sentence any more, because with the advent of technology it's all become a lot nastier and more complicated, with the bullies 'following' their victim on social networking sites and the like.
So yes, technology is always watching, and just like God, it claims to have all the answers and inevitably some people will use it as a force for good or evil. And there's no real answer to that, is there...except, if you get on a train with your iPod blaring out, and there's a blonde person with glasses on reading a book next to you...just please TURN THE BLOODY THING DOWN A BIT! OK?
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