It’s term time again which can only mean one thing: back to ironing on Monday and Friday mornings. I like a deadline so the deal is
that I have to get it all done before 9am when I start work. It commences
around 7 with brief interludes to push my children through the door and into
the arms of the school bus, to load forgotten cereal bowls into the dishwasher,
to put the washing on - lest I should have no clothes to iron in a few days’
time.
And to have a flit around Twitter.
I like Twitter because people can be very funny and in 140
characters they can be even funnier. It’s also where I hear about blogs and
writing competitions – so I can even pretend it’s work – and where fellow
tweeps share writing successes and woes which is the closest I get for hours,
sometimes, to having a chat with colleagues at break. I also like to have a
paddle around Facebook but we’ll leave that one there before you raise an eye at the suggestion that this may be something akin to work.
We got back from our summer holiday on the eve before school
began for the new term. I love being on holiday but I also love coming home,
even though it’s with a tinge of panic about getting back-to-it, that I’ve
forgotten how I work and what I need to do. It’s a real life recurring
dream for me. As is customary, I’d compiled my to-do list in the car as we left
the airport. Who am I kidding? I’d been adding to my to-do list all
holiday and this time I took out my pen to add some things that had needed
doing which I’d already done and could thus be ticked off. (Some of you won’t
understand this and I salute you.) The list had done the trick: no need to
panic. The house was clean, only the aftermath of a seven week period of
ironing on a need-only basis to contend with, the freezer was packed with food
and the fresh stuff was arriving by those kind home-delivery people with their
lively suggestion of substitutes just to keep life interesting.
Let’s just say, the stench which hit us as we opened the
front door was not a dead animal (or family of, I’d decided, with one still
limping to a better place, via the bottom of my bed), nor was it the entire
contents of the ‘cycling drawer’, although we do appreciate that I have now
washed every pair of gloves, neoprene socks and avoid-washing- unless-smelling-like-dead-animals
shower-proof- jackets. No, after an hour of false starts, my husband was the
unfortunate soul who discovered the source of the foul smell. We’d left the
freezer door ajar all holiday; our rammed full freezer, boasting fish fillets
after the lovely man from South Shields had paid his annual visit and persuaded
me that forty packs of assorted flavours were much better value than twenty.
There were a couple of blocks of stilton in there, too.
I would like to say a public thank you here to my husband
for launching into the first and by far the worst of the three all-over freezer
cleans, including all the pipe work and the floor below where putrid fish juice
had seeped.
And the home shopping delivery didn’t turn up.
Thankfully, if a little ironically, we’d bought fish and
chips on the way home so nobody went hungry for this tale. And our milkman had delivered
so we could have a cup of tea. Lots of
cups of tea. You see, there are perks to a by-gone age.
On holiday we had no Wi-Fi. Actually, we had a small allocation of Wi-Fi but my children’s Snapchatting needs, and
thus desire for the holiday quota, was greater than mine. It meant that I had
three weeks without the internet.
Now, I’m afraid that the freezer debacle with its laborious
insurance claim and urgent need to buy fish, or the distinct absence of ironing fairies – I know, I know, I really should have done
the uniform before midnight of the night before the new term – or even the time
spent having a couple of coffees with people I hadn’t seen for years (ok,
weeks) is not to blame for the fact that I am still chasing my tail
(or should I say, ‘tale’) a week after our return. I’m afraid, dear readers,
the cause is Wi-Fi, or to be precise: social media.
I’ve lamented before about the time sap that is this fairly
recent phenomenon of our need to share and share again our lives, but being
without social media on holiday was a different revelation this time. I had a
wonderful holiday. But I actually missed my online communication.
Even though I didn’t realise it until I got home.
Partly due to my woeful hearing making phone conversation
both for me and the poor person on the receiving end a little trying, but
mainly due to living in a world where most people of my generation and younger
are more likely to message than make a phone call, contact using the internet
has become my number one way of keeping in touch. It’s a sad admission that I
use any time I might have spent speaking on the phone, on-line, but other people are
doing the same. Even if I wanted to go back to sitting on the stairs in the
hall à la 70s, attached to a phone line via a curly wire connected to the
cheese wedge on the wall, and when I was only on the phone, when I was 'on the phone', I’m not sure many other people would have the
time or inclination to indulge me.
When my Wi-Fi returned and I logged into Facebook and
Twitter, read the funny little quips and personal messages, it made me smile.
There is something undoubtedly reassuring about sharing online that your house
stinks of rotten fish, your food delivery hasn’t turned up and you’re going to
be here for the foreseeable because you couldn’t be bothered to do the ironing
over the school holidays - and learning that you’re not alone. There is a
certain comfort in knowing that even when you were away, you weren’t forgotten.
And there’s something quite heartening about realising that a three week world
without internet was fun, but only that. It wasn’t superior, just different.
I have a love/hate relationship with technology. I spend
most of every day on the computer and am the most complaining and exacting of
companions: how dare you crash? How dare you not allow me to ‘save’, you’re a computer, that’s what you do! Yes, I should learn
how to use the new software but I don’t have time, so make it work anyway, if you wouldn’t mind. I always said I would happily ditch the
computer and go back to letter writing and postcards, to queuing in the post
office three days before deadlines to make sure my work reached its recipients safely, to sitting in the library with my amassed questions on post-it notes.
And I probably would go back to this world, if everyone else would join me.
But the internet is here to stay and thanks to a period of
abstinence, our relationship has deepened a little. I’m off to joyfully post
this on-line, appreciating the seconds it will take to do it, whilst repeating
the mantra that I will not complain about technology, that I will not have
unrealistic expectations, that I will happily use social media but ONLY when
I’m not working.
I have just removed my mobile phone to the hall.
How about you? Are you a technology lover or a fighter? And
how do you manage your time?
The great thing about posting photos online is that you
don’t see people yawn. I still cringe at
the memory of my poor sister travelling over from America to stay with us. After
settling her down on the sofa with a cup of Yorkshire Tea and a block of Dairy
Milk, the fire crackling and the snow falling softly outside (ok, it was raining, it's a minor detail), we decided that now would be
the perfect opportunity to show her the photographic evidence of our summer holiday, using our ‘new bit of kit’ (it was a few years ago): the television
through which you could magnify your photos to the size of a small painting.
Wonderful if you’re under ten, automatic soft focus would be kinder for anyone over 35. Said sister was stoic for the first 10% of the photos but
after that the head began to nod and the eyes roll and as she really needed to
stay awake until at least 8pm, all parties were unanimous in the decision to
save the photos for 4 o’clock the next morning instead, when she had her jet
lag induced insomnia. 
