Just A Phone Call Away

Anna, my wife, has left me. My lover, friend, mentor, spiritual guide, soulmate, has naffed off to the Azores for a week with a friend to visit another friend who lives there (how many friends does one person need?). 'Where are the Azores?' I hear you ask...in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean... and judging by the photos she's sending back it looks similar to Scotland on a bad weather day. Yet, in the Deux-Sèvres, we bask in heady sunshine and temperatures in the early twenties...that, my friends, is karma.

So while she is off gallivanting, I'm left keeping the show on the road: cooking, washing-up, feeding the fish, feeding the cat, feeding the chickens, feeding myself! Going to the mailbox EVERY DAY, collecting the chickens' eggs (who, incidentally, are now pushing out five a day...my cholesterol is going through the roof), putting the wheelie bins out, bringing them back in again. Work, work, work, give, give, give.

Every now and then I feel a little vibration in my pocket. Hello? Anna will have sent a photo or a message on WhatsApp reminding me to do a job I've just done. Even though she is in the middle of the Atlantic, hundreds, no thousands of miles away, she's only a text message away.

What did we do before we all had mobile phones? When I was at college in North London, I didn't speak to my parents for months, not because I didn't love them, but I couldn't be bothered to walk to the end of the Holloway Road, stand in a smelly phone box, pumping coins into a slot, when I could have been buying kebabs and booze. Nowadays if we don't get an instant reply to a text, we start thinking something's wrong or we've offended somebody... particularly in this world of: he's a she, and she's a them, he was a he, then a she, but now she wants to be a they...bloody hell! I find it confusing, so I can see how my poor dad and aunt struggle to keep up with the LGBTQ, I mean LGBTQIA+ nomenclature.

Anna is constantly looking at her phone, sending messages and replying to friends; not ten minutes goes by without a ping, ding, quack or fart coming from her pocket. My phone is much less active... that is because, as Anna so rightly says, I don't have any friends. Except for someone who keeps ringing me from Tunisia about six o'clock every evening.

Some young person told Anna that the generational divide is whether you text with your finger/fingers or thumbs. She suddenly started using her thumbs to type, with the result you need an Enigma machine to decipher most of her messages.

Even though we live so far from loved ones, they feel a whole lot nearer when we receive a message or photo. Daily pictures of our one year old granddaughter, Ari, or some footage of her doing something cute are gratefully received.

Then, of course, there's the family Zoom. Every Sunday 6pm my time 5pm theirs. Like many, we started during Covid and just kept going...me, my brother, sister, dad and aunt, sometimes a guest appearance from partners or children. But being a family who suffer from varying degrees of deafness and Tinnitus, there can be quite a lot of shouting over one another and repetition. I often have a sore throat on a Sunday evening come to think of it. Anna says she can hear every word through the office door, wherever in the house she is...even in the garden.

Though I live in rural France my internet connection is always good... it's my brother, who lives in South London (directly under the Crystal Palace mast) who is constantly cutting in and out like Norman Collier on a bad day. He also has that blurry background thing, very sinister. My sister surreptitiously does other work while Zooming (she's a woman, she can multitask), she thinks we don't notice...but we do.

In the final minute we will wish each other well, waving like lunes at the screen, simultaneously trying to find the 'end meeting' button...still waving...where is it?...still...ah there...thank goodness.

Ooh. There's that little vibration again. It'll be Anna telling me to write my article for the magazine.

And on that subject, three hearty cheers for Chris and Kathleens' tenure of The DSM, under whose leadership the magazine has gone from strength to strength. And best wishes to Lisa and Elfed who receive the baton.