Small moments of joy in modern life

Chateau L is a haven of accidental neo-luddism. It's not that we oppose new technology, it's just that we never seem to get round to it. Life is too short to be bothered with installing a fridge with a barcode reader that will reorder milk when it determines yours has turned to yoghurt, or cancel the cheese order a fortnight later when you haven't scanned it out. If you recall, about halfway through the London Olympics I went and bought a TV as ours was an analogue lump. We watched a week of sport, and have barely touched it since. We don't have a games console, we don't have a microwave, and somewhat archaically we still fiddle around with shiny little discs if we want to listen to music. This is how we like it, life is not complicated, and we are ideally equipped to be old people. Round here if you make a cup tea which has little floating white bits on the top, it's time to buy milk. A friend of mine recently had his entire flat "done". I'm not quite sure what done refers to, but it means everything is digital without a wire in sight, he can set the temperature from his mobile phone, and also turn lights on when he isn't there, though I'm yet to be convinced of the merits of the latter. He says it's for security; we just have a lion*.

Modern technology is amazing though, and as we don't have much of it I am still regularly able to be thrilled by things the rest of the world discovered several years ago. For instance I recently got a new phone, diligently set it up and feeling safety-conscious set a PIN. Ha! Nobody will ever be able to get in! My son noticed this new arrival, and despite having a phone so outdated even Mrs L had cast it off, asked if I had set up the fingerprint recognition. Wh-wh-aaat?! And then showed me how. It's amazing, I don't have to remember a number or a password, I just place either of my thumbs on it and hey presto it turns on! Tomorrow I might set up a finger or two, and I am hopeful it might be able to recognise the tip of my nose so I don't have to take my gloves off in winter.

Some of these date from as long ago as 1992!

The surprise and delight does not end there though. We took delivery of a new car last week, this being possibly the one area where we are significantly less backward. It does things, clever things. Mrs L hates it, she say's it's designed for men by men. Whatever, I love it. Automatic wipers that start when it rains are old hat, so are lights that come on when it gets dark or when you go in a tunnel, and then turn off again when you emerge the other side. But this new one also controls full beam for you. None of this flick off flick on nonsense, it just does it. Empty open road, full beam on. Car coming towards you, off just before it would matter. Genius, and what made it even better was that I had no idea. I was driving along, just about to flick them on and before I could so the car did it for me. I wasn't even quite sure what had happened until they turned off again, and then it was just a joy predicting when they would turn on and off. But that's not all it can do. You can talk to it. No, really. You can tell it to do things. For instance, let's say you had filled a USB stick with loads of quality music and plugged it in (one of two USB slots by the way, as well as a three-pin socket and three - count 'em - 12V thingys), you could then simply say "Play Taylor Swift" and it would do it. It's never heard your voice, never heard of Taylor Swift (!), but it just starts playing. Obviously this is for the benefit of my daughters, but it works on adult music too ahem. Even cleverer than having an in-depth knowledge of country music artists though, it can also recognise the white lines on the road. If you drift too close to them it will either correct for you, or if that's not safe, vibrate the steering column to alert you. If you indicate it doesn't. If you indicate right and drift left, it does. A genuinely useful application of technology, quite brilliant.

I mentioned this miracle at work, and was met with derision. Well of course cars do that. Cars even park themselves these days! I beg your pardon?! Park themselves?! But it's true, I've seen a video (a kind of moving picture), and there's somebody sat in a car opposite a space. They press a magic button, sit back and fold their arms, the steering wheel starts moving and the car backs itself into the space perfectly. How can that have been designed for men by men?! And I'm not talking about fancy cars like Mercedes and so on, this is on your average Ford, which is what we have. Well, we don't actually. I rushed home from work to see if our car would park itself and sadly there is no magic button. Also the old one had heated seats and this one doesn't. Rubbish.

*  extremely under-nourished, nonetheless highly alert

The Tree

If ever any proof were needed that you cannot do too much research in advance of a foreign birding trip, I think our recent Morocco jaunt bore it out. How far do you go? Would you, for example, having read a trip report that talked about birds being present in trees near a specific place, go so far as to identify a SPECIFIC TREE FROM OUTER SPACE?! Bradders would. Bradders did.

When I mentioned THE TREE to Mrs L, it took her some time to recover. Birders, she said, were very sane and well-balanced people. Or at least I think that’s what she said. When I left, some of the last words to pass her lips other than “I am going to miss you so so so much!”, and “Please please please don’t leave me!” were “Good luck with THE TREE!” I’d had a session on Google Earth with BBT prior to leaving, and was party to the location of the tree. I’d zoomed right in (satellite imagery these days is quite extraordinary) and mentally traced our driving route across the desert from Auberge Yasmina. So as I sat in the passenger seat of the 4x4 last week, GPS in hand as we bounced across the desert, I was quite confident of finding the precise arc of trees, and within them the particular tree, THE TREE, that was rumoured to contain Desert Sparrows.

 

Sure enough, the tree soon hove into view; the excitement within the car was almost palpable. I say almost as we had just had killer views of Desert Sparrow about two hours previously in the Erg Chebbi after our marathon walk across the dunes. Nonetheless, this was still a massive triumph. Three days earlier we had been sat in London looking at a dot on a map that was a tree; we were now standing next to that exact tree.

Bradders commando-rolled from the still moving vehicle and approached THE TREE. Bins out, scanning, straining his every sense.

It was empty.

Completely devoid of life.

No evidence of Desert Sparrow inhabitation whatsoever.

Like I said, a triumph of modern technology.

 

When Technology Fails

Largely, I like the gadgets that living in the year 2011 means exist for my convenience and entertainment. For instance, I like having my entire music collection on a very small piece of electronic wizardry. I enjoy the fact that my camera can take ten frames a second, and continue to do so for ages. I also enjoy not having to change the film after 36 shots, and instead being able to take over 1000 images without even thinking about it. I like the instant gratification that having a small screen on the back allows. And histograms, well, where do I start? There is no praise high enough. I like having all the calls and songs of hundreds of European birds on my phone as an instant reference, and I like being able to call friends and family from just about anywhere with the same device, especially when it is to report the bagging of Sandhill Cranes in Aberdeenshire when they are all miles away. As far as I am concernced, these are excellent uses of technology, and they suit my needs very well.

Sometimes however technology oversteps the mark. This happened today, and predictably the device in question was a satnav. Now satnavs have their uses, don’t get me wrong, many is the time that mine has got me to an unfamiliar location, there to see some rare bird or other. I daresay that on occasion not having had a satnav might have caused me to miss a bird whilst I faffed about working out where I needed to go. Today though I could have lived without a satnav. When you are driving down a road in the Norfolk countryside, and the satnav comes out with “continue 400 yards , then board ferry”, you have to wonder if technology isn’t all it’s cracked up to to be.

A ferry?!  The four of us in the car looked at each other and wondered if we had heard it right. We had, for about a minute later the road ended abruptly at a river, and there, clanking towards us from the other side, was a small chain ferry. WTF? The lady in the satnav had announced the ferry-boarding with absolutely no change in intonation, it had all been very factual. “Proceed down the road, board the ferry”. I might have forgiven it had she been marginally excited. “Guys, carry on for just a bit longer, and then there’s a surprise!”  But no, monotone. Actually it was quite exciting. Until we saw the sign that said a car and passengers would be charged £3.90 for the 45 second crossing. For the distance travelled, that made it more expensive than the Scillonian, which is saying something. At least there wasn’t a long wait, but it would have been nice to have been asked. More human to have been asked.

The old codger operating the ferry did not fail to notice the evident surprise on our faces. Didn’t mean to come ‘ere did ya?,  he said. No, we admitted. Satnav, he pronounced, with an air of certainty. Yes, we said. That’ll be £3.90, he said.