I suspect that I am being stalked by an irritating old man. I don’t often come face-to-face with him, but I know he is infesting the house, touching and disturbing my things, especially my clothes, not to mention my glasses. We have a strict rule that the upstairs glasses are never allowed to come downstairs and similarly the downstairs glasses are never allowed to go upstairs. Who, I ask myself, is responsible for this sensible rule to be so frequently ignored. I know it must be him.
We have a family tradition amongst the siblings of meeting up on Zoom to talk about the good old long-forgotten days when most of the people we ever knew were still alive. And there he was, bold as brass, sitting in my chair and wearing my clothes! Even more worrying was that when I looked at one of my brothers, I saw, with astonishment, that it was actually me, but dressed in my brother’s distinctive unpleasing manner.
I must acknowledge, however, that things are getting a little difficult these days. For example, I was trying to use the TV controller that did not want to work and was getting progressively angrier and angrier until I noticed that I was actually using the mobile telephone. This was more than annoying because I have long been at war with that dreaded thing that was made before they discovered zombie finger; a technical term for sufferers whose fingers are too old, cold or worn out to activate the screen; the latest models have a special setting called glove mode, or some other nonsensical phrase, to counteract this..
I also suspect that I am being attacked by gremlins. Younger readers may not recognise them; they were evil little bugs that hampered the war effort by making things go wrong, especially Spitfires, whenever they could. You could always spot them because they were a nasty pink colour and had little swastikas all over their tummies..
Persecution mania? I don’t think so. Modern life is full of persecution followed closely by idiot forms to fill in. A special enemy is the gramophone record, pretending to be a helpful young lady if you want to speak to the surgery. “No, thank you very much, but I would like to talk to a human being”, the gramophone record then pretends that it cannot understand. “Just tell me so that I can help…”, “No, I want a human”, “Just hold the line while I…, “Get me a human, damn you”. That last usually gets a result of sorts but leads to half an hour of listening to idiot music.
Meanwhile, the stranger is getting out of control with his screwdriver, tampering with various plugs or putting the washing-up away in the wrong place. It would not be so bad if he was interesting, but he only seems to know boring things or misinterpreted news. I could just barely tolerate his hiding my glasses if he would come clean and say where they were but, no chance, he pretends to be as mystified as I am.
We have Alexa to turn the lights on or off or remind you of what you are supposed to do next. It is said she has to ask China first for permission before doing anything, if so, it is remarkable fast. The Chinese are welcome to know what I am doing for all the good that could do them if it keeps them out of mischief. As long as they don’t bore me with telling me what they are doing.
Sadly modern technology is there to help. Fat chance if you are using a mendacious thing called ‘customer service’ which is actually there to encourage cardiac arrest. You will likely be bombarded with demands for yet another password. Mature people grew out of having passwords before they left school. I remember that during the war some military halfwit gave his men a password of ‘hi-di-hi ‘answered by ‘ho-di-ho’; even the army had to put a stop to that. We once had the embarrassment of being lost as some fool had taken down all the road signs to annoy the Germans; my father asked a passer-by, a vicar as it turned out, for directions. The good man demanded to see his identity card. My father apologised and said that he had left it behind in Berlin; I don’t remember my mother being too pleased. He could be like that, once we were in a train and walked past a compartment of German prisoners, guarded by four soldiers sitting in the four corners with rifles and fixed bayonets; my father looked through the door and wished them ‘Schöne Ferien’. The Germans thought being wished a happy holiday very funny and laughed loudly. Luckily, the phlegmatic guards took no notice but I was quite sure that we would be shot as fifth columnists.
But the fight goes on. The battle against falls from potholes and uneven pavements is aided by a sturdy knobkerry. Because of the nose-dive by the BBC in maintaining the spoken tongue we now have to use sub-titles for English programmes as well as American and French. The young have always been difficult to understand with their jerky mumbling but now contemporaries are getting increasingly difficult as well. There are an astonishingly large number of helpful friends and neighbours to call on when the need arises. There is also the freedom not to care about what the neighbours think or is the shirt in harmony with the jacket. No longer any need to do up the top button, wear a silly hat or call anybody Sir without good cause.
Martin Tucker