So this is me: getting to grips with technology, and if you squint towards the horizon you'll see the mazy cloud of angst I have generated doing it.
I have decided that being a techno-phobe is no way to live in 2011 and so, admittedly somewhat late in the day, I have decided to embrace all things gadget. This blog, which I hope you will enjoy, as an in-box liberating alternative to the interminable emails I usually regale you with, is evidence of my new hi-tech fervour. We'll be streaming and feeding, up- and down-loading, syncing and sharing to our hearts' content in no time.
Trust me.......
So, first of all, in a move unprecedented in my personal history, I embarked on my latest trip to the US without a book. Well that isn't quite true. I had books, of course, packed in my suitcase, but not in my hand luggage (which, here in the US, is known as your 'carry-on', and a right carry-on it turns out to be, sometimes, too). To understand just how cutting-edge this development is for me you'd have to know me. I'm the woman whose nose is almost always stuck in a book, or if my nose isn't stuck in it my finger is, keeping the place where my nose was before you interrupted me.
Travelling sounds so glamorous but in fact all it is a lot of interminable waiting around and paying through the nose for over-priced food and drink. Although the plane is moving you are not; wedged, as you are, into the cripplingly narrow seat, most movement beyong the swivelling of the eyeballs from one side of a page to the other being a physical impossiblity. Reading, I find, eases the ennui of travel (but then again I believe it eases the ennui of life, so I'm probably biased).
Generally speaking I crack the spine of a new novel in the coffee bar at the Terminal; my regular treat this, in recompense for the very early start from home and the stresses of the rail journey to the airport, the long wait in the queue to check in and the ordeal of the security screening. Once the gate is announced I make my way there and read on, and usually I have hardly got myself settled in my seat before I'm at it again, burrowing down into the story so that the hours can pass unnoticed.
But I must say that a bulky book, in addition to the other things I have to carry on in my carry on, has recently felt somewhat unwieldy and so this trip, with my zeal for the new fangled shining an exploratory light I decided to see if technology could provide an alternative.
I reviewed the existing essential carry ons and identified two items which could provide alternative means of fiction-delivery. Firstly my little pink Ipod. I searched Itunes and discovered an audio version of a book which I had recently looked for on Amazon but been unable to find in print. AJ Cronin's The Stars Look Down was available as an unabridged audiobook and only cost a few quid, so I purchased it, downloaded it and sync'd it onto poddie. It was cynch, and would give me hours of aural entertainment.
Secondly I found out (can't remember how, now) that the Kindle app could be downloaded free to any PC and since I always carry my little blue netbook when I go abroad, which is itself not much more size or weight than your average hard-backed book, I decided to give that a go too. Again, it was easy-squeezy, even for an old duffer like me. And then!! Wow! When I came to browse the kindle books available I was spoilt for choice, lots of my favourite classics and some of them even free of charge. Obscure Trollopes and an Elizabeth Gaskell I'd never even heard of. I was in heaven.
Thus, well electronically supplied, I ventured out, my carry-on and my heart feeling light.
All went well. I opted to begin with the audio book and was soon engrossed. I think that the server in the coffee place was impressed to see me, a middle aged woman, so wholeheartedly harnessing the wonders of avant-garde audio apparatus. She certainly almost jumped out of her skin when I placed my order. (Although, in retrospect, perhaps it was just that I yelled my coffee order; one tends to overcompensate when wearing those in-ear headphones). Having my hands free was an odd sensation which could only be rectified by giving them a pain au chocolat to cope with, although I felt bad about this as the characters in the book are all famished due to an on-going strike at the pit.
I must say that, at the gate, having my eyes at liberty even while my imagination was treading the streets of Tynecastle in search of food, was really enjoyable - people-watching is just so entertaining, isn't it? - and I identified those fellow passengers that I really hoped I wouldn't be sitting next to: the very large lady, the very small woman with the yelling child, the freaky man in shorts (in February!), the Benedictine Monk, complete with tonsure, sandals and unspeakably dirty (but no doubt very holy) feet.
I'd just got to a really good bit, where David, the hero of The Stars Look Down had taken on notorious bully Slogger over a sack of coal scavenged from the slag-heap, when it was time to board. I shouldn't have been worried about my travel-neighbour. In my determination to utilise technology I had checked in on line the day before and carefully chosen an aisle seat leaving a single seat vacant between me and the next passenger, the E seat which, along with the D, is the seat which no one wants; the disadvantage of squashed and uncomfortably close proximity unalleviated by the view out of the window.
David is taken home by Wept (so called because he spends two weeks every year parading up and down a local seaside promenade sandwiched between two boards reminding holiday-makers with seasonally inappropriate dolour that 'Jesus Wept') to be given some much needed food and medical attention and I settled myself in my seat, splendidly separated from the hapless occupant of seat D by the vast and pleasing expanse of seat E (quickly appropriated by my jacket and later by my legs).
Paying eye-service to the stewardess as she demonstrated the mechanism of the seat-belt and the location of the emergency doors, I listened entranced as the story continued. The scene had shifted to the opulent residence of the mine-owner, his bed-ridden wife and his poor over-looked son promised to be enchanting companions for the long flight and I was congratulating myself on the success of the whole technologically-driven adventure when a piercing BING BONG penetrated even my literature plugged ears and an illuminated sign dashed my inaugural foray into electronic-only in-flight entertainment to smithereens.
'Switch off all electronic appliances', it said.