Life without the phone

 

I am determined to be happy.  And why not?  There is much to be happy about.  Today has been cold, but bright and fine.  The sea has looked particularly uninviting in a positively attractive and sparkling way and lunch was good.  But as I sit here and type I know that lurking in my left hand jeans’ pocket is a new mobile phone.

Normally those last three words would be a cause of guilty jubilation for me as yet another gadget asks to be plugged into a power source.  But not this time.

My ‘reserve’ Yotaphone 2 (I am still the only person I know who has even heard of this make) has given up the ghost and I have had to take it to be assessed and repaired.  I know that I am not the only person with a Yotaphone 2 in Castelldefels because some guy (it was from a male changing room locked locker) stole it from me, but I have yet to see anyone else with one, or should I say with what used to be mine!  My ‘reserve’ Yotaphone 2 is my third (the second went into the pool and was never the same again) and I keep on buying them because they are the only phones to have two faces: the normal screen you get with every phone and a second back screen which acts like a Kindle screen so that you can read in sunlight.

There are rumours and even ‘reviews’ of a fabled Yotaphone 3, but unless you live in China or possibly Russia such a thing remains the stuff of legend.  Even the Yotaphone 2 is now ‘discontinued’ in the bargain on-line bucket store from which I bought the last one.  I was left without a phone.

Now the last thing that I use my phone for is to phone.  Indeed the first time I had a call on the thing I had no idea how to answer it and had to wait for it to stop ringing, see who phoned me and then phone them back.  Obviously I learned how to answer the thing, but it still remained a niche activity for me.

I use my phone to read.  I read The Guardian every day and do the quick Guardian crossword first thing with my cup of morning tea.  This ‘quick’ crossword has taken me as little as 4-and-a-bit minutes to do (my very best time) and as long as utter-shame-for-an-ex-English-teacher sort of time, but it has become a sort of ritual and I quite like worrying my way to some odd words and then questioning the definition that was given as a clue to justify my tardiness.

I also read books on the phone.  I have got used to the screen size and it doesn’t worry me - as long as the reading matter is engrossing.  I find that I prefer reading non-fiction on the phone rather than literature because I think that the pace to take in factual information is slower than the rush of narrative.

My Spanish/English go-to dictionary is on my phone.  I use the Reverso phone app which is quick, informative and free.  I use the camera on the phone, but not half as much as I want to.  I enjoy photography, but rarely take the time to improve my skills.  And then there is the Internet and all the niggling little pieces of information that one used to ignore because one couldn’t be bothered to go to the dusty volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, or in the case of my family The Children’s Britannica or the big Chambers Encyclopaedia.  Now, in seconds information and answers are available with little effort.  Although, of course the fact that the Web gives us so much so quickly is an absolute delight, there is little sense of achievement.  There is no selection of what might be the right volume, no turning pages, no reference to indices, no remembering an almost forgotten volume in which there might be a reference, no combing contents, no . . . OK, let’s face it, much of the process of ‘looking something up’ was boring, frustrating and very often futile, because even when you got the information and read about it at length in an encyclopaedia, that information was usually way out of date.  Now, there is a different level of frustration.

Take my trying to find a new old Yotaphone 2.  I have (electronically) bounced around the world going from site to site, following up references and suggestions, sticking and pasting leads into search engines in the hope that I can get to where I want to go.  And, just like the books, I go from page to page, flitting from lead to lead.  I find myself distracted: three clicks and I am engrossed in something which has nothing to do with what I started out my search for.  I wrench myself back and go on a roller coaster of emotion as what I am searching for seems tantalizingly near and then electronically crumbles away into the same old dead ends.

And this was taken away from me with the death of my phone.  After a day (even with the liberal application of laptop) I was having withdrawal symptoms.  My absent phone was a like a phantom limb.  I couldn’t stand it.

So now I am the ‘proud’ owner of a Qubo.

This is a phone that can be hidden in the palm of my hand.  It has a screen the size of a large stamp and looks like something that I would not have bought all those years ago when mobile phones looked like that.  I showed it to the family as they had come for lunch and to see the Fayre that had taken over the centre of Castelldefels and they burst into horrified laughter and then expressed concern about my atavistic taste!

But I am impressed by what this 38-euro phone can actually do.  It has internet (though I don’t know how to get on it), a camera, a torch, plays music (none there), holds my contacts, oh and makes telephone calls.  I am not going to be reading books on the thing, but that is not why I bought it, and I don’t think that its internal memory is exactly large enough to take more than a pamphlet.  I have taken three photos and they seem to be somewhere inside the machine.  I am not sure how many more images can be stored, but I am hoping that my repaired phone will be returned to me so that I won’t have to find out.

Shop!  Please phone my landline and tell me that my link to the world has been restored!

The Great Stink

We have a great beach - it may not be very wide, but it is certainly long.  The entire population of Barcelona can easily fit on it, and on many sunny Sundays in summer I think it probably does!  The currents in the sea generally bring people in to the shore rather than drag them out to their deaths; the water is fairly shallow until you get out a reasonable distance; we have restaurants, bars and chiringuitos, and, above all we have sun.  A perfect little seaside town with all the facilities that you would expect.  Perfect.

Except for the smell.  One redolent of drains and not the sort of ambience in which the consumption of anything (including sunshine and sea bathing) is encouraged.

The smell reminded me of something that Cousteau said in the 60s, about the Med being already dead because of the amount of waste that the Med countries emptied into the waters.  He was wrong of course, but not for lack of unscrupulous countries trying to prove him right by treating (in whatever verb tense you would like to consider) the Med as a handy sewer.

What has caused our noxious effluvium?  Construction.  It turns out that one building site (and believe you me, we have many) has punctured or ruptured or simply buggered up one drain with the result that waste has flowed through storm water channels through the beach to the sea.  Television last night showed depressing black-rivers-of-death like pictures of filth flowing into our sand heavy waters.  To add to the drama of the situation, red warning flags were flown on the beach and lifeguards were patrolling urging people not to bathe.  We were also told that thing would be back to normal in a day.  Which is today.  And the smell, through reduced, is still there.

For any place this would not be good news, for a place that makes the bulk of its income from a family-safe tourist destination it is little short of disaster.  Having said that, on my bike journey back from the pool after my swim that takes me along the Paseo of the beach, I saw that, for a Tuesday the beach was filling up nicely and that there were quite a few people in the water.  And not dissolving!

To be fair, our town takes such things seriously and when something happens to threaten the reputation of the resort, they do something about it.  I will be interested to see the colour of the flags when we go out for lunch; whether I believe them or not, however, is quite another story.

In Castelldefels you are much more likely to be injured by the quality of driving and parking, than you are by anything to do with the beach and the water.  As a resident I have to keep telling myself that many of the drivers are coming here for the first time and looking for a parking space and, clearly, not thinking about other road users.  Pedestrian visitors usually park next to the beach on a long car park that is separated from the beach by the main beach road.  There are numerous zebra crossings linking the parking area with the paseo and beach, but pedestrians are not inclined to walk more than a few meters for a safe crossing and are much more likely to chance their arm (and all other part of their anatomy) by blithely walking across the road as through it was one extended crossing.  I have noticed in Spain that there is an assumption that there is an extensive zone around the actual painted crossing which has exactly the same rights in pedestrians’ minds as the crossing itself.  Remember, I tell myself, these people are visitors and the sight of the sea turns them into vulnerable lemmings.  And I further remind myself that having right on your side is insufficient comfort for injury.  So give them leeway and believe in the myth of the extra crossing zone.  I may tell myself all these reasonable things, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce my irritation by the continued unreasonable conduct of some of our visitors.  Most of our visitors.  No, that’s unfair.  Probably.

Parking, however, is in another universe of selfishness.  I use the Tesco Scale of Unreasonable Parking to guide my responses.  It never fails to horrify me to see just how far selfish parkers will go in Tesco car parks rather than walk a couple of steps and be legal.  Parking without cards in disabled spaces is the norm; double yellow lines are routinely ignored; parking across space lines, single people parking in family spaces, parking on crossings, double parking - I’ve seen all of them, and I’ve also seen just how near a legal empty space can be for these people.  Apart from some small Tesco’s in London with little car parking space, I have never been to a large Tesco where the car park was full.  Never.  So, I thought that I was prepared for anything.

Castelldefels is the only place in the world where I have seen a driver reversing on a small roundabout!  Now that is what I call spectacular idiocy!  There may be elements of inconsideration in the action too, but generally, given what a roundabout actually is, the no-brainer stupidity of the action is more of a characteristic!  But, leave that almost glorious piece of anti-driving aside, how do our visitors park in Castelldefels?

Appallingly.  Selfishly.  Dangerously.  Some of their decisions are aided and abetted by the way that our streets are organized.  It is a general truth that many Spanish towns developed before the widespread adoption of the motorcar.  Our streets are too narrow and curbside parking makes them perilous.  In Cardiff the go-to solution for any traffic problem is to seed the roads with traffic lights, in Castelldefels the solution is zebra crossings.  Except, of course, the solution is one that comes with ready-made problems.

I do not know the regulations for the position of zebra crossings in Castelldefels, and I am certain that if road designers know them they forget them as soon as they look at a road plan.  There is one large roundabout in the centre of the town where, each time I go around it, I tell myself that this time I will finally count the number of crossings that it spawns, but by the time that I finally get there after so may stop starts and sudden sallies by suicidally inclined pedestrians that I have inevitably forgotten the number by the time I emerge from the circular hell.

Although Toni tells me that it is illegal and not in the Spanish version of the highway code, cars park right up to zebra crossings and sometimes on them!  Cars park on corners, on pavements, on chevroned areas, on lines of any colour.  They park within inches of other parked cars - which make one wonder how they got in.  Well, no it doesn’t: I have watched Spanish drivers ‘parking by touch’ on more than one (or indeed twenty) occasions.  Your average Spanish driver may be better than I am at reverse parking into a small space, but not that much better.  Space is at a premium this close to the sea, so where you can find it you use it, and the hell with consideration!

During the week, even in summer, things are sort-of manageable, but during the weekends, and especially holiday weekends they are unimaginable.  Finding a parking space becomes the only moral imperative in driving, and all road rules are thrown out of the window as lane crossing and indication becomes something of winter, not a luxury that can be allowed in the height of summer!

“Zen and the Art of Spanish Driving” would be an interesting book to read, though I am not sure under which section it would be kept: Philosophy? Religion? Fiction? Self-defence? Fantasy? Dystopia? Wish-fulfilment? Humour? Adventure?  I am half inclined to type it into Google just to see if it exists!

My Chinese phablet is under repair.  Or possibly not.  It may be that repairing it goes beyond a necessary expense and becomes a ‘junk-it’ alternative.  The problem is that I keep my mobile phone in my short’s pocket and the phablet being oversize meant that I managed to bend the body slightly.  However slightly it was it has played merry hell with the charging of the bloody thing.  I have had to fall back on my Russian alternative.

Yota phone is a make that no one apart from myself seems to have heard of.  It was discovered by Toni who informed me that a phone existed that had two faces: one an ordinary mobile phone screen, and the other on the back something like a black and white Kindle screen.  I did not believe that such a thing existed, but now I have had three of them (1 stolen; 1 dunked in the swimming pool; 1 bought cheaply as a reserve and now in full use) and can recommend them fully but, as is noted in the parenthesis, they are not waterproof!

It may be that the repair to my phablet is affordable, in which case I will return to the phone and enjoy the large screen.  If it is not then I will either stick with my Yota phone or go for something more substantial and waterproof.  I rather like the idea of getting a new phone, but Toni will be disapproving of such warrantless expense.  I have found a phone called the Blackview BV8000 Pro, where even the product name seems defiantly rugged.  I must admit that I am tempted and the price is not too ridiculous.  As opposed, for example to the new proposed Samsung 8 Note.

I was one of the hapless potential owners of the ill-famed Note 7, that the entire technology world remembers as The Phone That Exploded, or at least burst into flame.  I pre-ordered one of these phones and, after a long waiting period was finally told (by the World Press) that Samsung had had to initiate a worldwide recall.  Which was a little harsh, as I didn’t even managed to get my hands on one for even the briefest moment of time.

Samsung have announced that they are going to refurbish some of the millions of recalled phones (with a non exploding battery) and sell them at a yet-to-be-announced price.  I am strangely drawn to this, especially as the new and improved Note 8 is probably going to be the first (non-bling) production mobile phone to break the four figure price barrier: certainly in dollars and perhaps in Euros as well!  Even I draw the line somewhere in my lust for cutting edge tech.  Though the suggested appearance of the thing does make it look lovely.  And it is waterproof - or however such a term is subscribed, qualified and defined in relation to expensive gadgets and liquids.

I will be strong.  I can resist.  But, as always, Oscar is right, everything but temptation.

Technology bites back!

For a person who has been in the forefront of technology, when it comes to gadgets, all of his spending life, I am surprisingly opaque when it comes to the hardware.  As I type I am surrounded by a positive Bolognese of wires and an obsolescence of machines, but I am still a fingers-on-the-keys and bugger the mechanics of what I am using sort of person.  I still have a touching faith in the belief that makers of computers are on my side and that they are and have been doing everything that they can do to make my computing experience as joyful as possible.  Self-delusion of course, but it keeps me sane.

            Which is all a way of building up to the fact that things are not working as well as they should be.  Various arcane messages have been flashing up on my computer screen that, I think, indicate that things are not working at an optimum level.  As I have no idea what to do in response to these messages I have, of course, ignored them.

            This was a Bad Idea and I have paid the price as the machine has slowly but inevitably ground down to impotence.  That infuriating little circular symbol of many colours, which is an indication that the computer is thinking, and is going to ignore your commands, has become a more permanent icon on my bright screen.

            Eventually, of course, I had to follow the implacable advice of Toni and go to YouTube and discover What To Do.

            Eighteen pages of advice later I was more in a cold sweat panic than surveying the possibilities of restoring my machine to working order.

            Eventually, of course, I bought a program to do what I am sure Toni would have done at no cost whatsoever.  As the dreaded little circle of colours has reappeared during the typing of this missive, I am not sure that the payment of money has had any real effect, or indeed affect – I am still not sure about the correct use of those words.

            However, in the world of real facts, I am able to type without total frustration and that, in itself, is something.  We will have to see what happens when I try and add the Internet to the mixture – that usually does something more interesting and unexpected.

            I think that my basic point is that as a dedicated user of computers and so forth, I really do think that they should be just a tad more responsive and, dare I use the word, kind.

            However, they are not, and I constantly feel like throwing whatever device I am using away from me with extreme force.

            At which time, of course, I need to remember that I am of the generation where schools had only one BBC B computer to their names and counted themselves lucky.  I am of the generation that used an early version of Windows where the sacrifice of a full-blooded cockerel was sine quo non for anything to work.  I am of the generation when things simply didn’t work.

            But I thought that things had changed.  I put this down to the fact that I had a Mac at a fairly early stage of my computer development and got used to an operating system that seemed to be user friendly.  And when Windows stole the operating system that Apple had already stolen in their turn I thought that things had finally got to a stage where you could relax: the computer was on your side.

            Well, that didn’t really happen, and, in spite of the developed sophistication and complexity of the computers, they still have the unerring capability of reducing you to stuttering imbecility at a single keystroke.  But I wouldn’t be without them.

            So, it is with increasing excitement and ill concealed impatience that I await my latest gadget.  I am not sure what “between 3 and 5 working days” to get it to me actually means to the distant Chinese factory producing the mobile phone that I have ordered (apart, of course, of it not being “between 3 and 5 working days”) but, in spite of the fact that I rarely use the phone as a phone, I cannot wait for the gleaming (golden) outsized piece of bling to arrive and for me to get down to the serious business of not understanding its most basic capabilities!

If I want to frighten myself, I just sit down and try and work out how much my parents and I have paid over the years for my poor sight.  Admittedly in the early years of my sight deterioration I had a pair of round NHS black wire rimmed curly ear ended things that made me look, as my father so caringly pointed out like, “the Owl of the Remove”!

            My glasses became a little more presentable over the years, but the price and the delay in getting them made – as well as the sheer discomfort of wearing the bloody things made them a Necessary Object of Dislike.  I am sure that there is another blog post of a disquisition on the number of NODs that one has in one’s life, but this is not the time.

            As soon as it became a practical possibility I turned to contact lenses.  I was so keen to have them that I even paid part of the cost out of my own money!  I think it was this measure that persuaded my parents that I was in deadly earnest and they ponied up for the rest.

            I still remember my first fitting for lenses.  They were eventually placed on my eyes and, as they were made of hard plastic, the eye did its best to get rid of them.  It was impossible to raise one’s eyes from the downcast position because of the extreme pain.  Having got the things in, I was then sent from Windsor Place in Cardiff where my optician was situated, to wander around town for an extended period of time to allow the oxygen (in the centre of a city!) to do its stuff and see if my eyes would accept the lenses.

            I stumbled back into the opticians after having looked like a self-effacing picture of modesty, emitting yelps of pain when I forgot and raised my eyes.  I persevered and became a confirmed contact lens wearer.

            Recently I have gone back to my glasses, but fickle as ever, I have now decided to return to the lenses.

            And how much easier is it when they are daily lenses and made out of accommodating plastic.

            My problem of being short sighted and long sighted at the same time has attempted to be coped with by a variety of contact lens prescriptions – none of which has worked.  I have therefore decided to go with a contact lens prescription for normal seeing and using magnetic glasses for reading.

            The magnetic glasses are hideous and I am not sure how you are supposed to transport them.  I know that the fact that they ‘break’ means that you should wear them around your neck, but how does that work when you are driving?

            Something else to complicate my life.

Well this writing has seeped on over days and I am going to post it to get it out of the way and allow something new to take its place.