By Michael Talibard
AS the world moves on, we oldies get left behind. This series of articles is not only about ageism in its worst sense, of discriminatory behaviour against the old. It is also about the more innocent kind, which is visited upon us merely by social change. The young move forward at their own pace, and why shouldn’t they? Good luck to them. But we can’t keep up, and so come to feel that we don’t quite belong in this modern world. We are “out of touch”.
Back in the day, folk used to communicate by letter or postcard – or sometimes by telegram: remember those? And do you remember the airmail letter, its every blue inch covered in handwriting? If you are over 80 you will. And back then, the postal service actually worked: letters arrived promptly. And looking even further back, the Post Office issued in 1880 an announcement apologising for the fact that there would be only one postal delivery on Christmas Day rather than the usual two. I could put up with that!
So in my youth, we still sometimes wrote letters, but mostly we used the telephone instead: my generation seemed to go in for long phone calls – sometimes very long phone calls. I never liked those. It’s hard to say why, but I tend to feel itchy and uncomfortable after about ten minutes on the phone, if not sooner.
My favourite form of communication is the email. This came into common use in the 1990s and I soon took to it warmly. It combines the arrival speed of a phone call with the courtesy of a letter. The phone, unless they have taken special measures to silence it, makes intrusive loud noises in the other person’s home, saying “answer me, answer me”. By contrast, an email waits politely until the recipient wants to read it. Excellent! In my case this is pretty soon, as I check them frequently.
I wish everyone of my generation liked email as much as I do, but they don’t. Actually, there are people with email who don’t read them every day! There are even those who don’t do email at all! And now I must make a confession: I am sometimes guilty of ageism in referring to these non-email persons as dinosaurs.
I say “my generation” because (the above exceptions apart) it is we older ones for whom email is a key channel of communication. Our children have moved on: unaccountably, they prefer texting or messaging, or a platform such as WhatsApp, Twitter or Instagram. I have no acquaintance with any of these, which I guess makes me a dinosaur, but, as I understand it, they often send photos with few or no words attached. So that’s not really much like a letter at all!
The pace of change accelerates: I gather that the media just mentioned, still unexplored by me, are already being superseded by things called Signal, Telegram, Kik Messenger, Viber and Discord. I don’t see how this constant change can work. Doesn’t one lose track of the story so far?
What about the phone itself? This has evolved from the good old landline telephone to those clunky cell phones you see in old films, to the mobile phone, and to the modern smartphone, which doubles as a computer and a camera kit. I have deliberately chosen to stay with the old landline: so, again, I’m a dinosaur. In Britain today, 5% of the adult population do not own a mobile phone. That is 2½ million people, mostly elderly. I am one of them.
However, if you don’t have a modern phone, it gets increasingly difficult to deal with all sorts of admin connected to holidays, tax, insurance and so on. The algorithm that is handling your business will demand that you give it a mobile phone number before it will move you on to the next page. So you have to abandon the online approach and obtain or print yourself a paper form to fill in, which is not always available. In the case of Jersey tax, that will cost you two months of earlier deadline. Do we oldies without that phone feel discriminated against? You bet we do.
Anyway, the changes are not all bad news. I do enjoy being able to see the person I’m talking to, and so I am a regular user on my desktop computer of Skype and/or Facetime. This, and many other things I can use it for, make me really glad that I am more computer-literate than most octogenarians. The home computer is one of those many things that make me feel lucky to have been born just when I was, rather than in my second-choice epoch, the “age of reason” in the late 18th century. Now is good.
Michael Talibard, who is now in his 80s, is a retired teacher and former head of English at Victoria College. He founded the Jersey branch of U3A and was its chairman for 20 years.
