It’s gone far enough. It’s crazy. In little over a month it will be 2010. By all rights 2010 should be in the distant future. In 7 weeks it will be in the present. I wander around with stuff in my pockets that belong in science fiction. I used my phone to watch a film last weekend. Today I used it to play boggle. In-between it has been used to find where my bus stop was, map my run (with speed,distance and elevation stats), find out A.C. Slater’s full name ( Albert Clifford Slater Sanchez) and share a picture of what I was eating with the world. I think I have made four phone calls with it this month. It’s smaller than a guinea pig and better than anything in Star Trek.
I am feeling dislodged from time more keenly at the moment, because I will be going home in a few weeks. I left the UK in August 2007 and have been living mostly on an alien world ever since. In the phone shop last week (when I was trying to get the magical device I mentioned in the last paragraph repaired), an old woman bought a new phone, left the shop, and promptly returned with three cabbages as a thank you gift. I’m fairly sure this has never happened in a Carphone Warehouse
When you go to university, you feel your home-town remains in stasis as you grow in wisdom and knowledge, towering above the mere mortals you left behind, frozen in their unchanging landscapes of familiar experience. It is the arrogance of youth, and the cramming of inexperienced berks into a society that values inexperienced berks who have read books above all else that produces this effect. Leaving the country feels like you are the one frozen while the world at home changes at an unforgiving pace. Of course, neither of these are true. Change is everywhere. You can’t step in the same river once.
This year, I’m quite looking forward to the new changes, to being the bewildered alien, the traveller stepping out of his time machine into a world of morelocks, zavvis and lady gagas. I might spend my final few months in Japan (whenever they may be…) in complete news isolation, for the sheer joy of having my friends explain in detail what new mundanities clutter up the cultural landscape when I return. Because if science fiction is missing anything, it’s the quotidian.
There is no facebook in aliens. In space, nobody can hear you tweet.
Actually, there is an astronaut on twitter. I was following him while he was in space, “tweeting” (the world doesn’t seem grand enough to describe messages FROM SPACE). It was fantastic. I was following the USA elections last year on my magical omni-screen, although I wish I wasn’t- imagine the fun of making a family member explain to me that the man on the telly was the President of the USA. Pull the other one. At one stage, briefly, I didn’t know who the Prime Minister of the UK was (although, I didn’t know that I didn’t know, philosophy fans). Right now, I have heard of a Jedward but my mental image is that of a rhino with two heads and some king of pineapple appendage. Please don’t spoil that image with fact.
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