180 We Are All Going Backwards

Before I begin,

Here are two paintings.  One was done by my 4-year-old grandson at nursery. 

The other was recently sold at the London Gallery.  

Which is which?

*****

Two weeks ago, we went into someone else’s house for the first time for more than a year.  We popped in to see David and Penny.  I was at school with David and so I have known him for sixty years.

David was wondering what our fathers, who both died about 30 years ago, would make of the scientific and social changes that have happened in the time since they died.

He thinks that all he would need do would be to hand his iPhone to his dad and tell him to study it for a few hours.  A smart phone encapsulates or contains, many of the recent technological changes and the social media phenomena that have happened during that period.

Have these recent technological advances been beneficial in every instance?  I suspect that not all have and I suggest that although they all seem to be superficially beneficial, some aspects of some advances have made life - for me at least - more challenging.

In the 1930s, Aldous Huxley wrote about problematic features of scientific progress. It’s only fairly recently that I have come to understand how perceptive and ahead of the times he was.

The BBC launched DAB digital radio broadcasts in 1995.  I have had a DAB radio for about 10 years but it is still only tuned to four stations: Radio 2, Radio 4, Radio 5 and BBC Sport.  Smooth Radio was there once but one day when I pressed the button, it had gone.  It had moved and I have never been able to find it again.

Do you remember the “old days” when Radio 2 was on 1500 metres long wave; Radio 4 was 93.5 FM and Radio 5 was at 693 and 909 medium wave?  Those were the days when, if you knew where it was, a new station could be found within 10 seconds.  

Advances in radio technology have caused me to have problems I never had before.  To find, select and save a station to a digital radio, this is the rigmarole that has to be gone through:  

1. Find either the tuning button on the radio labelled “scan” or possibly, “retune”.

2. If there isn’t such a button, you must look in the radio menu for the “autoscan” option.

3. Press the “Enter” or the “OK” button.

4. The radio starts to scan for new stations.

5. After about a minute, all the stations that your radio can receive should then be listed alphabetically.

6. Sometimes, you may find that stations are missing but you can use an online “postcode search” to see what should be available where you are.  I’ve no idea what you do if a station should be there but isn’t because the manual doesn’t say.

7. There may be some stations that use “DAB plus”, that your radio can’t pick up.  Then what?  The manual doesn’t say.

8. Save the selected stations to a dedicated button on your radio.

Compare that with the time when you turned a knob to possibly, “long wave” and then turned a dial to 1500.  It was so simple.

Light bulbs are another thing that have changed.  Before about 2005, light bulbs simply had either a bayonet or a screw fitting. 

Now, there are around 30 different varieties of fitting.  There are 10 different kinds or sizes of screw fitting; 2 types of twist and lock bases; 7 kinds of fluorescent pin bases and 9 kinds of bi-pin bases.

The wattage of the bulb was printed on the bulb to indicate its brightness.  A 25-watt bulb would be used in a table lamp, perhaps, while a 40-watt bulb was for a very small room or, possibly, the cupboard under the stairs.  60-watt bulbs would light a small room while 100 and 150-watt bulbs were for larger rooms.  It was all very simple.  The higher the wattage, the brighter the bulb. 

However, due to the introduction of newer technologies giving us Halogen, Compact Fluorescent Lamp (CFL) and Light Emitting Diode (LED) bulbs, you can now produce the same amount of light using far less energy (wattage) and “lumens” are used now to measure brightness.

To have a bulb now that produces the same amount of light as an old 60W bulb, you will need to buy either a 42W halogen bulb, a 15W CFL bulb or a 10W LED  bulb.  Got that?

Twenty years ago, if  the bulb in the bathroom had blown, I would have bought a 60-watt bayonet fit and would have nothing more to think about.

Today, there is also the issue of the Kelvin value that determines the bulb’s “colour temperature”.  This determines whether light bulbs produce ‘warm’ or ‘cold’ light. Bulbs with a low Kelvin value produce a warm yellow light for creating a cosy ambience, whilst bulbs with a higher Kelvin value produce a cool blue light.

I would be happy with any Kelvin value bulb.  Caroline might want one with a low K value that flattered her first thing in the morning.

It’s all too much!

We’ve had our current coffee percolator for 11 years.  It is connected to a timer set to start “percking” at 07:30 and it’s ideal for our needs.  It makes six large mugs of coffee and the coffee made this way, stays heated and perfect for up to 5 hours. 

Eventually, it is going to wear out.  The seal in the lid has been replaced twice.  Dualit, the company that made my machine, no longer make replacement parts and they have stopped making coffee percolators altogether.  They say there is no demand for coffee percolators.  What!  

It seems that there is nothing being made now that will exactly duplicate my percolator’s functions because, for Health and Safety reasons, modern percolators must have an on/off button.  

As it is a button and not a switch that could be left overnight in the “ON” position, it means that new percolators don’t start until the “ON” button is pressed by someone.  Therefore, modern percolators cannot work remotely with a timer and so the days when I could walk into the kitchen at 7.45 and find the coffee ready, will soon be no more.

To make matters worse, as a “safety feature”, a modern percolator will switch itself off after 50 minutes.  That is ridiculous.  Where is the possible danger in a percolator like mine that doesn’t ever switch itself off? 

Percolated coffee is proper coffee with none of the pretentious, ostentatious, continental affectations that the stupidly expensive, modern coffee machines produce.

There are machines with a programmable timer but they are “filter” coffee machines.  In the advertisements for them, they all trumpet the fact that they have an “automatic turn off” function.  Why?

Dualit’s most expensive coffee machine for home use costs £1,700.  if you think that’s ridiculously expensive, please bear in mind that it is capable of “creating latte art”, whatever the hell that is.  It will only make one or two cups at a time but, unimportantly as far as I’m concerned, it will make espresso, cappuccino and latte.  Useless and I don’t care!

My percolator cost £49 and it makes proper coffee, not shabby, showy, shite.

Aldous Huxley said, “Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards,” and he was right.

*****

The first painting is titled “Fireworks” and it’s by Joshua Hall, aged 4.

The second is by Dafila Scott and is titled “Solo in Lockdown”.  

I don’t know what it sold for but the unsold paintings in the exhibition by this artist are priced at between £1250 and £3500.

’48. THE KING' and Cricket

My grandchildren came for lunch on the Sunday before Christmas.  William and Annie and their parents, Lucy and David, stopped off on their way back to Yorkshire after spending the weekend in London with friends.

Caroline decided that at 2 years and 8 months, William is old enough to enjoy the taste of mango juice.  He drank it but I’m not sure that he enjoyed it.  He did like the glass that it was served in, however.  I can’t remember where it came from but it has a coloured picture of Elvis Presley on it.

“Who’s that, William?” Caroline asked him, pointing at the picture.

“Don’t know.”

“It’s The King, ah-ha haa,” said Caroline, dropping her voice an octave for the, “ah-ha haa.”

“Who is it?”

William said nothing but just smiled.

“It’s, The King, ah-ha haa,” repeated Caroline. 

This went on for a minute or two.  Eventually William would answer that it was "The King" much to Caroline’s amusement but he was reluctant or unable to growl, “ah-ha haa.”

This coaching/training/prompting of infants is something that many people seem to do.  I suppose that it’s marginally more useful and slightly more interesting than teaching a dog to fetch a stick but any benefit or reward seems to be more in favour of the adult than the child. 

I was once guilty of similar behaviour myself.  When my son Tom was the same age as William is now, I taught him to say, “eleven,” after I’d prompted him with, “What’s seven plus four?” and to answer, “Seventeen,” after, “Eight plus nine is?” 

There were several people at the time, including two old ladies at the checkout at Waitrose in Barnet, who thought that they’d met a genius.  The two women were so convinced  that he was a prodigy, they spent five minutes trying to persuade me that I should allow them to contact the BBC. 

Like the good educationalist that she is, Caroline spent a lot of time on Sunday afternoon reinforcing William’s learnt behaviour. By two o’clock, all Caroline had to do was to point to the picture of Elvis and William would say, “The King” after which he would bow his head and a second later mutter, “ah-ha haa.”

Then Lucy went too far.  “Curl your lip when you say ‘ah-ha haa’ William, like this.”  But William couldn’t.  Just as some people can’t curl their tongues, so I suppose, the curling of the lip is a gift that is not bestowed on everyone.  I can’t do it either.

*********

Caroline’s brother and his wife gave me a fantastic Christmas present.  It’s an automatic pepper grinder.  When I first opened the box, I thought that they’d given me a present intended for Caroline but I soon realised that it wasn’t what I thought it was.  It looks like a green, tapered cylinder with an outlet at the side at the top. 

To use it you pick it up and tilt it. Inside there must be some kind of gravity switch and as soon as it reaches a certain angle the grinder starts and out comes freshly ground pepper. It’s great because it means that you can carry on shovelling food into your mouth, or at least always have a free hand, while adding pepper.

Caroline got a high-tech present too which she thinks is fantastic. My son, Tom, gave her a pair of gloves with the ends of the thumbs and index fingers missing.  This means that she can use her iPhone without having to take her gloves off. 

We are both very easily pleased.

********

It was Christmas Day yesterday and I was so tired as a result of the activities I indulged in during the day, at eleven o’clock I went to bed.  It was not an easy decision and I made it despite the fact that the fourth test match between England and Australia was to start in half an hour but that just shows how tired I was.

However, I was awake at 5:15 this morning (Boxing Day).  A minute after that the television was on and I was ready to watch the last hour and a half of the cricket.

63 – 0 was the score.  England were doing well.  A good job I went to bed, I thought.  There must have been rain for most of the day.  I’ve had a good night’s sleep and I’ve only missed 15 overs.  Then I had another thought: “What’s the time in Melbourne?  Maybe play has ended for the day and I’m watching the highlights.”

I turned on the radio and heard the commentary matching the television pictures.  Actually it was five seconds ahead of the television pictures as usual.  Why is that?  Therefore the cricket was live and so it must have rained after all.

Then the bombshell: Cook hit a boundary and I was informed that England were now only 25 runs behind Australia’s first innings total of 98. Bloody Hell !!! I’d missed one of the best day’s cricket ever. 

Now, upon reflection, I realise that I hadn’t really.  What I had done was to sleep through the most important six hours of

THE BEST DAY EVER IN THE 

HISTORY OF THE WORLD

Unless you’re Australian of course.  Tee hee!

42. Predicted Surgery

Texting is not something that I do very much.  To the best of my knowledge I have never instigated a text discourse.  I wouldn’t know how to.  I have taken part in textual intercourse once or twice but only to respond to someone who has contacted me by text first.  “What’s Stella’s phone number?” I was asked recently and I replied, “020 XXXX XXXX” thinking while I did so that it was rude of the person who had asked for this information not to phone me and ask for it.  Couldn’t she face the prospect of talking to me, I wondered?

Predictive text is something that blows my mind.  Sometimes when I have nothing else to do, I start a note on my phone keypad by bashing away at the keyboard without really looking at it to find that I have come up with perhaps, “tydu fofnd cjdh chhxso” which predictably transforms into “G’DAY TRAY FOUND CHISEL”.

Then, I write a posting using those words, plus a bit of padding, in the order that they appear.  So, it might begin, “G’day Bruce, I was looking in the tray you lent me and I think that I’ve found the chisel that you told me you lost.”

Three of the 44 postings I have made since January are actually written by my iPhone and only the punctuation and padding is mine.  

Sometimes predictive text can cause problems.  I was pushing a trolley around Sainsbury’s on Tuesday and I had got everything on my list except one thing: STORAGE.  I had no idea what that meant.  I couldn’t remember writing it and assumed that Caroline, knowing that I was going shopping, had added it to the list on my phone.  I thought that it was a bit vague of her but nonetheless I bought three storage jars.

Four hours later as I began to prepare the dumplings to have with our stew, I realised what had happened.  My phone had not recognised ‘ATORA’, which is a brand of suet and had altered it to ‘STORAGE’.

********

I have had five surgical operations in my life - four under general anaesthetic and one with a local.

The first was thirty-five years ago when I had an abscess removed from my upper jaw.  It was causing me no pain at all and I would not have known that it was there if it hadn’t shown up on X-rays.  I agreed to the operation because in those days one never argued with doctors or dentists.  

In the 70s, Barnet Hospital was not the multi-million-pound showpiece that it is today.  It consisted of one, fifty-year-old central building and about twenty satellite prefabricated buildings that housed the various departments.  The ward that I was admitted to was one of these prefabs.

The procedure was to take place under general anaesthetic and within an hour of admission I was lying on a bed feeling a little drowsy, very apprehensive and nervous.  A nurse gave me an injection in my bum and soon afterwards I fell asleep.  I was woken by the spatter of freezing cold rain on my face.  

I was lying on a trolley being pushed through driving rain along a roadway towards the operating theatre.  I looked up to see who was pushing me and saw two hospital porters. They were both holding an umbrella to keep themselves dry (not me) and one was smoking a cigarette.  We got to the theatre where I remember being told to count down from a hundred and that was it.  

At six o’clock that evening I felt good and told the nurse that I was going home.  She said that I had to stay in overnight.  It was a Wednesday and my favourite TV programme was on at eight o’clock and I was not going to miss it and so I discharged myself.  Several nurses treated me as if I were a convict making an escape but I got out and away.

A few years after that I had an operation, again under general anaesthetic, to straighten the septum in my nose.  The septum is the cartilage wall separating the nostrils of the nose and is, I was told at the time, the last part of your body to stop growing.  This means that it has nowhere to go as it keeps growing and so it may bend and close off a nostril.  My left nostril was permanently blocked.  

Is the septum really the last part to stop growing?  Surely the ears are.  My ears are a lot longer now than they were when I was thirty and if I’d had ears like this when I was eighteen when the rest of me stopped growing, I’d have looked even more freakish than I did at the time.

Caroline made an interesting discovery the other day.  “Your left big toe is getting shorter,” she cried out with some delight.

She’s right.  My left big toe is half a centimetre shorter than the right one and it never used to be.  What’s going on here?  Is there anything else getting smaller?  What next?

Twenty-five years ago, I had a vasectomy under a local anaesthetic.  This was done at a clinic in Soho, central London and my appointment was for nine in the morning.  When I had arrived and registered, I found the part of the clinic where the procedure was to take place.  

I discovered that I was in a group of about twenty men all of whom had nine o’clock appointments too.  We sat on chairs along the wall of a corridor in alphabetical order. Guess who was last?

Every five minutes or so the next one went in and we all moved down a chair getting nearer and nearer to the door.  After the event, the patient appeared in the corridor through a door ten yards from the one he had gone in through.  Virtually every one of them thought that it was really funny to stand facing those of us still waiting and to writhe in agony with their hands grasping their crotch, before walking off grinning.

At last it was my turn.  I had heard stories about how long it took and I decided to time it.

“OK,” said the surgeon, giving me a friendly and encouraging smile.  Last one this morning.  You’ll feel a sharp prick and a little bit of pain and it will be all over before you know it.”

“That will make a nice change from feeling a total prick,” I said, looking at my watch and trying to inject a bit of levity and humour into the proceedings.

“OOOWW!”

“Do you follow football?” asked the nurse who was standing by my side.

“Yes,” I hissed through gritted teeth.

“Who do you support?” she said.

“Norwich.”

“How are they doing this season?”

“OK.”

“Do you see them play very often?”

Look,” I snapped.  “I know why you’re asking me these stupid questions and I suppose it’s nice of you but I’m in a bit of pain and I really don’t want to talk at the moment. So, will you please shut up?”

The surgeon raised his head from between my legs, holding a scalpel that looked as if it had been dipped in red paint.

“There’s no need to be rude to the nurse, Mr Wilson,” he said sternly, waving his scalpel at me.  He wasn’t smiling now.  

“She’s just doing her job and she doesn’t need people like you with that kind of attitude.  So, if you can’t be pleasant, be quiet.”

“OK I will,” I said sheepishly.  “And it’s Wilton.”

He got back to work.  Four minutes 23 seconds.

I was lying on the table before I had my liver transplant when I met the anaesthetist who came over and introduced himself to me.

“How long will this last?” I asked him.

“Why?”

“I’m just curious.”

“It doesn’t make any difference to you,” he said.  If you wake up, the time doesn’t matter and if you don’t wake up, you’re dead.”  

Ten hours!

On April 6^th 2009, six months to the day after my liver transplant, I had a total hip replacement operation at the same hospital – Broward General in Fort Lauderdale, Miami.  As I was coming around in the recovery suite after the operation, I was in a little bit of pain, only semi-conscious and feeling very sorry for myself.  In came Dr Selvaggi, my liver surgeon, who was in charge of my medical care. 

We chatted for a short time and then he asked if he could have a look at my hip.  He lifted the sheet, stared at the hip area for a time and then said, 

“Good job.  What a nice clean cut.  Great amputation.”  

Then he left.  Caroline arrived to see him coming out of the room, absolutely pissing himself. 

“Got him!” he laughed and walked off grinning from ear to ear.  She had no idea what he meant until she came in to find me a little tearful and very upset.

I’ve got at least two more operations to look forward to.  My left knee joint is going to need replacing in a year or two and the bones in my left ankle are deteriorating rapidly.  The ‘avascular necrosis’, affecting my knee and ankle (the symptoms are identical to arthritis but the original cause is different) is the result of the side effects of the massive steroid doses I was given after my transplant.  I am certainly not complaining, however, as it’s a very small price to pay for all these bonus years.