She who must be obeyed has been working over Xmas, and has to work today and tomorrow in order to accumulate some days for a trip we intend taking in January. But yesterday was a rare day off so we found ourselves, as is usually the case, sitting in a coffee shop.
I could see her looking around at the slick surroundings in a slick shopping mall, and then came the question: “How has life changed since you were young”?
Apparently this was initially intended as a rhetorical question, because she then amused me for fifteen minutes with stories of her youth, when there were no coffee shops, no shopping malls, and the best she could manage was to stand in the only local store with a one baht coin and ponder for a long time what sweeties to buy (nothing much has changed over the years with regards to her pondering duration). Climbing trees to gather mangoes, going to her grandmother’s house to enjoy her cooking, it all sounded like a pretty good childhood.
“And how about you” she asked, “do you remember the old days in black and white”?
She always refers to my childhood as “the old days”, and as the only photographs she has seen of those times are in black and white, maybe she thinks my recall is also in monochrome.
But it was a difficult question to answer. There are so many variables in life. Of course the world changes, but so does your personal perception of that world. Your circumstances change, your lifestyle changes, and each time you move to live in a different country you have to partially reset the perception counter and start again.
I told her I thought the world is a less gentle place than it used to be, but also that I was less naive than I used to be, and maybe the world has always been a dangerous, unpleasant place and I am just more aware of it now. I told her I remembered waking to a choking yellow mist outside our home in Teesside, enthusiastically produced by the ICI chemical works on a regular basis and probably poisonous; an occurrence that would not be tolerated in today’s society (unless it happened in another country in which case nobody would really care). I told her that anything more than 3 baths a week would have been considered a waste of water (looking back, given that now I consider anything less than two showers a day as unacceptable, that was pretty disgusting). But most of all, I told her, the biggest change has been in technology, and I don’t mean the introduction of cup holders in cars (although they have become an essential part of civilised living).
It’s the internet. Nothing else in my lifetime has permeated and changed my everyday life to the same extent. Of course, first we had to have computers, and they came along in a household friendly size at just the right time to start my three year old son on the path to the technical maestro he is today. But it’s the internet that has most altered my little world.
In my youth I would retire to the toilet with my father’s copy of The Daily Mirror newspaper and absorb whatever it was that the editor was trying to make me believe. Nowadays I can retire to the toilet with my phone and get the news as reported by Al-Jazeera, The Guardian, or a blogger sitting in Afghanistan. Provided I stay away from Fox News, all theses sources are providing an element of the truth and I am left to decide which to accept as fact. In “the old days”, I would eagerly await for a letter to drop through the slot in the front door. Now, I am slotless, and correspondences arrive almost instantaneously from anywhere in the world, and I can read them anywhere there is a phone signal.
And for much of my life, the television has served as the main source of entertainment and information in the home. The moon landing, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and Blackadder; all my defining cultural moments of the last century came out of the small box in the corner (your defining moments may differ).
And there is still good stuff to be found on the TV. James May’s Toy Stories has been a recent delight. Yesterday I watched the latest Top Gear in (sort of) HD. And plenty of excellent series from America to enjoy; such as House M.D. But I don’t get them from the TV, I download them from the internet. I don’t watch the news on TV anymore, the internet has better coverage. I don’t watch three year old, generally crap, movies on the TV, I download a rip of the DVD from the internet. I don’t keep a personal diary any more, I have Pattaya Days (actually, I never kept a personal diary for more than three days into a new year after someone gave me a diary for Xmas “to record your thoughts in”. My first thought always being “why didn’t you give me cash instead?”).
And now we don’t watch TV any more. She who must be obeyed would occasionally watch the Thai news, or a mindless celebrity entertainment channel; but now she is straight onto the computer when she gets home to pick flowers, tend to pets, plough fields and undertake all the necessary tasks required to manage her various Facebook games. And I stopped watching a long time ago. So it is time to say goodbye.
Our television service is provided by True - UBC, and it is truly horrible. There are many, many channels, but they are all junk, or in Thai, or both. The last few months I only ever switched on to watch the Grand Prix races, but the commentary was so dire I have instead been downloading the excellent BBC coverage and watching the race on the following day. So I called up UBC and attempted to cancel.
Sawadee krap, I would like to cancel my UBC subscription.
Yes sir, it expires at the end of this month, would you like to renew?
No, I want to cancel.
Oh, can I ask why?
Yes, all your channels are rubbish.
Well perhaps you would like to move to a cheaper package with fewer channels?
So I would get fewer channels, but they would all still be rubbish?
Yes.
No.
Oh…. Well perhaps you have a friend and you could transfer your subscription to them.
I don’t have any friends.
Oh.
So please come and take away the satellite dish.
Oh. Well, I can’t actually authorise that, but someone will call you back to arrange this. Thank you for using our service.
Of course nobody has called me back and I suspect they never will. Still, we can always turn the satellite dish into a wok; now that’s something your couldn’t do in the old days.
Comments 🔗
2009-12-31| Antz saysGood luck with UBCrap - when I cancelled mine, it took them 3 months before they came to pickup my dish, and another 2 months before I saw my deposit refunded. A truely (excuse the pun, not intended) poor company….