Last week, for the first time in several years, I made an evening trip into town to visit the theatre. Big cities evolve into unfamiliar, altered landscapes in one’s absence, and I had become a stranger.
Could I still park where I used to? How much time to allow? Which roads were pedestrianised? My lack of confidence infuriated me. Who was this anxious old woman in a wheelchair, clutching her mobile phone to ward off all evil?
Ah, that phone. The comforter that offered me routes, timings, succour. Which held my hand like my mother when I was five. So horribly precise it enabled me to rendezvous with a friend like a space station docking.
“ETA 2 mins.”
“I’m waiting outside.”
“Which door?”
“Main one.”
Isn’t it incredible, I said to her, how once upon a time we arranged everything without phones? We located each other in pubs or stations or street corners, we caught buses and flights, we wound down the window and asked for directions, we had deep conversations, we got things done. Those analogue lives were richer. We were open to random events, the thrill of the unexpected: meeting strangers, taking the unknown road, doing things slowly, happy to get lost and find ourselves again.
Life was more inconvenient, for sure, but we were braver, freer, more spontaneous and resourceful. We embraced the unexpected. We tried harder. The Bafta-winning scriptwriter Neil Forsyth, whose forthcoming Netflix show Legends is set in the 1990s, mused recently about the appeal of the pre-digital period for drama, because it offered scope for secrets, misunderstandings, surprises. Things we’re nostalgic for.
Drama in a contemporary setting, Forsyth suggested, consists of people standing around a computer telling each other things they’ve learned from the computer. Or, you might add, sitting together Googling stuff on their phones rather than talking. I’m allergic to pub quizzes, but I reckon the present craze is a reaction against instantly accessible information.
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Much that is irresistible in life flows from fallibility and flawed communication – pratfalls, miscalculations, coincidences, random events, ignorance, misunderstandings. It’s the story of chance and delayed connection, of what happens when we tumble into the spaces in between.
This week the New Yorker magazine carried a riveting essay about messages thrown into the sea in bottles, perhaps the ultimate analogue concept of fragile hope and banal communication; the antithesis of a smartphone. (Though when it comes to slow-motion feedback, I reckon the time capsule I saw builders put into the gable wall of our cottage 20 years ago – a copy of the Sun, half a bottle of Irn-Bru and a Blue Riband wrapper – would give your average message in a bottle a run for its money.)
MIBs, as aficionados call them, became a thing in 1833 when a Baltimore newspaper published a short story by Edgar Allan Poe about a man on a sinking ship casting a bottle containing a manuscript into the sea. By the 1890s Prince Albert I of Monaco had launched 1,675 bottles into the North Atlantic.
Sadly less plentiful since smartphones came along, MIBs still cross oceans freighted with mystery and poignancy. One message I loved, found by an American collector with a tally of 150 bottles in 20 years, was written on Princess Cruises notepaper: “It’s been interesting, it’s the end of a 8 year relationship. We are both putting messages in a bottle… Brenda, hope you find what you are looking for. Love, Frank.”
Somehow, symbolically, this puts me and my digital security blanket to shame. Next time I go out, I’m going analogue.
Photograph by Gabe Souza/Portland Press Herald via Getty Images