22. Outdoor Clock
... being a look at the fact that none of us are getting any younger, the curse of the smartphone, and the steady passage of time.
I’ve just found out that I’ve only got twenty more years to live. I am currently sixty odd. If I am very careful, and with a modicum of good fortune, I might stretch that twenty out a bit. My doctor says that there is an outside chance that I could almost double it, but make no mistake about it. My years are numbered.
I’m thinking that way because I have just had a week of contemplating getting older from a variety of perspectives.
On Monday my learned friend Frank Colley gave one of his short talks on the poet A.E Houseman, who, in his collection A Shropshire Lad, had the audacity to whinge about only expecting to live a half century further than his twentieth birthday…
And since to look at things in bloom Fifty springs are little room, About the woodlands I will go To see the cherry hung with snow.
Fifty years! Luxury.
Then, on Tuesday, I went to the cinema to see a strange production of Hamlet, featuring Ian McKellen as the melancholy Dane. At eighty odd years of age, he was older than his mother, older than his wicked stepfather - older than everyone else in the production. He was easily fifty years older than the average age of actors who usually play Hamlet. It was unsettling at first, but you kind of got used to it after a bit.
And then on Wednesday I went to a meeting of the Mexborough and District Heritage Society, to listen to another octogenarian give a talk about her schooldays, which was illustrated by photographs, of school trips in the early 1950s.
I had a night off on Thursday, and then, on Friday I went to see the 69 year old madcap self-made punk icon Mik Artistik on stage in Doncaster. One of the songs he sang was called forty-four years to live, which I thought contained such funny ideas that I pinched an essence of it for the opening paragraph of this piece.
I’m not making excuses, but the next day I attended My sister’s sixtieth birthday party. (My little sister - Sixty!). What a week! And now I am composing, typing and editing this, late on Saturday evening in anticipation that it will be good enough for you to read before my self imposed deadline of eleven o’clock in the morning. So if it is more shoddily written and disjointed than normal - you know why.
Old people get odd ideas. Many of us want things to be like they were when we were young, and get frustrated when we realise that that is never going to happen. We rage against the youth of today, the speed of developments in technology, the pace of the modern world, our impending doom, and the enormity of the amount of stuff that we haven’t got around to doing and will in all probability, never now get the time to do. .
I am one of those old people. Ian McKellen and Mik Artistic are probably not. They surround themselves with younger actors, or younger musicians, and just carry on achieving. I’m More of an A.E Houseman, moaning about how few chances remain for me to look at cherry trees.
Yet I have tried to do something about one of the frustrations of old age recently. Instead of just passively being frustrated about the speed of developments in technology, I have bought myself an old fashioned Nokia dumbphone and ditched my iPhone. Well, to be completely honest, I’ve not exactly ditched it, but tried to confine my use of it to when I am in the house.
I can’t remember exactly when I got my first smartphone. I had a blackberry at one point, which Judy, my wife, famously once threw out of the car window in frustration that I was spending a little too much time on it. But within a year or so of that, we both had fifth generation iPhones and were beginning to slide into addiction.
I suddenly had Social Media - which meant that I could publish my tiniest thoughts anywhere and anytime, and my friends and acquaintances were always with me, sharing their tiniest thoughts too, and responding to mine like some sort of a Greek chorus following me around. I welcomed that chorus, engaged with it and loved its company.
I suddenly had a top notch camera permanently in my pocket. I could record and share any image that I saw, instantly. I loved it. Suddenly I was a real artist publicising my unique perspective on the world!
And I suddenly had the world’s knowledge at my fingertips. Wherever I was. I no longer had to wonder about things such as how old Ian McKellen actually is, or what the distance is between Mexborough and the New York borough known as the Bronx, or what the average life expectancy of a Yorkshire man born in 1961 is. I could just look them up. Instantly!
This felt marvellous, magical, futuristic and impossible. Amazingly it is only a dozen or so years since Blackberry phones went into decline, and iPhone 5s came out, so given that I always buy things after they have become sufficiently outdated for me to be able to afford them, I have probably only been a smartphone user for about ten years.
And now, the technophobic old codger in me is beginning to assert himself, and tell me that all the things that I thought were wonderful are actually ruining my life.
I can hardly have a thought of my own without wanting to instantly communicate it to that greek chorus. I can hardly see an interesting thing without wanting to have it on my camera. And conversations that begin along the lines of “Ian McKellen - I wonder how old he is these days - never develop further than the time it takes to reach into your pocket and fire up wikipedia. The quality of my interaction with the world has changed. I thought that It had changed for the better, but now I think that I was wrong.
So now my pockets bulge with my dumbphone, my actual real life credit cards and money, and sometimes an actual camera. I am also trying to get back into using a notebook and pen.
I am convinced that not having that smartphone to hand all the time is helping me to see the world as I used to see it just over a decade ago: Back when I could look at something and enjoy it for what it was, rather than wanting to instantly show it to the rest of the world. Back when I could focus on an idea for whole minutes at a time, maybe even longer. Back when I could think without reference to others, and only write something down when I had cogitated on it and examined it from a number of angles1
Back then, I had got into the habit of carrying a notebook and pen around with me all the time. And when I had a quiet moment, and something worth writing in it, that is exactly what I would do - without reference to smartphones and photography. Perhaps pretentiously, I felt that it connected me to poets of ages past, to Shakespeare, Wordsworth, and yes - A.E Houseman and the practice of carrying a common book to collect my thoughts in.
The last time that I remember doing this effectively was whilst I was sitting outside a country pub on an early summer’s day, waiting for friends. I can’t have had a smartphone in my pocket, or I would have just started scrolling through facebook, or at best looked up something about the history of the area I was in, and then posted a fact about it along with a photograph on facebook. Instead, I looked at the broken clock attached to the wall, and started to think about it. To concentrate on it, and notice the details of it. To consider the implications of those details. I jotted down some of those thoughts, and after a bit of spit and polish back home, they turned into this…
Outdoor Clock
The outdoor clock hangs from a bracket on the wall Saying “half past six” Whatever the time It has said that for an age Since the heat of the fat yellow sun expanded the cheap metal of its hands Loosening and liberating them To swing downwards And point to the centre of the Earth It looks like a clock made to hang in a railway station In the golden age of steam But it never did. It was put together hurriedly From cheap materials To give the illusion Of bygone days When the world was different And the heat of the fat yellow sun erodes the cheap paint on its dial Cracking and flaking Making it old Before it is old Its battery lies dead and seeping within the case Rusted in Never to be replaced Irreplaceable And the moist rain falling from the sky pools at the bottom of the dial Around half past six Sometimes reaching seven o’clock Before it slowly evaporates Or drips away Little pearls Dropping, plopping With a clock like regularity And genesis occurs between five and seven Microscopic life Nurtured by the fat yellow sun and the moist rain falling from the sky Thriving in the waters of the occasional half past six pools Miniscule mosses and lichen Bacteria Leaving brittle traces when it is dry To discolour and roughen the thin glass Ephemeral generations ebb and flow As seasons pass Creating change Unhurriedly With the heat of the fat yellow sun and the moist rain falling from the sky. Sediments settle Strata form Marking a different time
Of course I am aware that all boastfulness about not being tied to social media, the smartphone camera and the internet is a bit ironic when I am sitting in front of a computer composing an essay on Substack to try and impress that Greek Chorus that I still passionately desire to be a leading member of. But that’s life, full of complications and ambiguities.
When I buy a phone I claim that I don't need all the extras I just need a phone but then I look on YouTube to watch music videos to pass the time waiting for taxis or in the dentists waiting room.
I've just started about a year ago on Facebook, which I claim is helpful to not miss local music gigs and stuff.It is good for that but then I start scrolling sending messages to people I'm actually likely to see in real life a couple of days later
I enjoyed the poem and am pleased you go around with notebook and pencil
"My Learned Friend" thanks for that Mike. I have to agree with the sentiments of this piece, however
you forgot to mention the agony of climbing up the stairs to bed every night, I am now of an age where a downstairs bedroom and of course bathroom would be a god send (if of course you were a believer ) which I am not. but you know what I mean.