My children will be denied mobile phones for as long as possible, since I am still not convinced about the safety of mobile phones.
Do mobile phones contribute to cancer? I’m darned if I know, although last week I read numerous reports of yet another scientific study into the matter. This one, undertaken for the UK’s Health Protection Agency, found that there were no conclusive risks to brain function, or of cancer or infertility. However, it also pointed out that very little was known about the long-term effects, since the technology is relatively new, and therefore it was best if children in particular avoided “excessive” mobile phone use. All of which, it seems to me, is the equivalent of saying: if you’re an optimist, take this as good news; if you’re a pessimist, carry on worrying; and if you’re a child, continue to plague your mother for a mobile phone so that she can then nag you not to over-use it when you finally get one.
What none of us seem willing to do, however, is restrict our reliance upon the technology: already, it is too powerful a national addiction. In just 15 years, it has hooked us as irrevocably as the smoking habit did our forefathers. Who would have imagined, 20 years ago, that there would ever be quite so much to say, so many tiny yet crucial decisions that required instantaneous, urgent conferral? How did we fill the great, yawning stretch of our days, back in the decades when – to paraphrase Yeats – peace came dropping slow, before the era when messages and calls swept in at dawn like a swarm of angry wasps and buzzed late into the night.
It wouldn’t surprise me if mobile phones were indeed linked to cancer, that sibilant Gollum that lurks in modern life. Almost everything we are predisposed to enjoy is: cigarettes, alcohol, sex, sunshine, sausages, chips, biscuits and barbecues. But there are roughly 80 million mobile phones in Britain, and the market is not yet saturated.
I have never much liked talking for long on a mobile, because after a while it gives me a sore ear. I have one because it has become difficult to work and live without it, but I prefer to send texts. I used to hound my husband to use a wired landline when possible, lest he irradiate his thinking parts, but my droning admonitions became tedious even to me.
I plan to deny mobiles to my children for as long as possible, beyond the point when they have begun to hate me for it, but even now my daughter – just short of three years old – likes nothing better than to strut around chatting with fluent and convincing authority on a makeshift phone of inert plastic. As a mother, all I can imagine are their soft little skulls, being slowly warmed by radiation waves; as children, all they can see is the most obvious symbol of adult independence, throbbing knowingly in their hands.
People who still fret about mobiles and wireless technology, as I do, are mainly seen as swivel-eyed medieval peasants who understand nothing about technology and less about radiation. That might be right, but then one reads that France has banned mobile phones from primary schools and all related advertising targeted at children; Israel has passed legislation to ensure that all mobile phones come with a “cancer risk” health warning; and childhood brain cancers have doubled.
The “electro-smog” in which so many of us live is continuous and uncontrollable. Today, a nice man from BT arrived to replace our home’s old Wi-Fi router with a Home Hub 3, which sends out a more powerful signal. I had already made a little trade-off in my head in which the convenience of the signal outweighed my internal murmur of anxiety (last year, a Council of Europe committee called for the banning of Wi-Fi in schools).
I am, of course, already sitting in a thick smog of my London neighbours’ Wi-Fi signals, over which I have no control. None the less, I asked the BT man how to temporarily disable the “wireless” emission, while using a plug-in cable to access the broadband. He was helpful, but he didn’t know how to do it. It appeared to be an extraordinarily unusual and complicated request. I began to seem a little nuts, even to myself, but then I remembered all those glossy advertisements confidently claiming that cigarettes were healthful and soothing for the throat, in an era when only weirdos and prudes refused to light up.
Don’t tell me I’m confused: I know I am. But wouldn’t you be? He suggested that I might want to call the BT Helpdesk. I think I will, but I also think that the relentless, indispensable Wi‑Fi acts as a metaphor for the great, experimental march of technology: no matter what you do, or what it does, you can’t turn it off.
Prevent the spread of butty rage
Barry Sheerman, the Labour MP for Huddersfield, had an unfortunate day last week, which apparently began with “the worst coffee and bacon bap in London” from a kiosk in Victoria station. The acute disappointment led Mr Sheerman to tweet crossly: “Why can’t Camden Food Co employ English staff?” – in the aftermath of which he found himself embroiled in a vitriolic Twitter row about xenophobia.
All of which serves to demonstrate the dark places to which “butty rage” can take a fellow. When done properly, the bacon bap is a thing of unsurpassed delight. I don’t know what the precise problem was with Mr Sheerman’s, but I would venture to say that in my experience the nationality of the maker is not the chief problem, since there are many ways that even British natives contrive to ruin such a simple source of happiness.
One of the greatest errors is “going posh”, which is why one must never, ever order a bacon sandwich at an expensive hotel. They will give you bacon on griddled sourdough drizzled with olive oil, which is enough to trigger a Sheerman-style fury.
The best butty, in my view, is made from back bacon cooked until brown mottles the pink and the rind is crispy, stuck in a springy white buttered bap and garnished with a proletarian jet of ketchup or brown sauce. Wash down with hot, strong tea – and leave Twitter well alone.
Wrinkles don’t make love smoother
The report last week about the husband and wife in Italy who are getting divorced at the ages of 99 and 96 reminds me of that joke about the couple who decide to separate at the age of 100. When a distraught lawyer asks them, “Why do a thing like this at your age?” they look at each other conspiratorially and say: “Well, we wanted to wait until the children were dead.”
People find the Italian story shocking because marriage in old age is widely supposed to be about the herbivorous emotions of tolerance, acceptance, and compromise. The carnivorous feelings of passion and fury – with their power to pierce hearts and shred lives – are held to be for those young enough to withstand their assaults.
But why should it be so? Many elderly people feel things just as powerfully as their younger counterparts. The Italian divorce proceedings were apparently initiated because the husband discovered letters revealing an affair his wife had in 1940. That may simply have brought decades of low-level misery to a head – or it may be that, after all those years, he still feels strongly enough about her to have a broken heart.
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