All Our Eggs In One Basket

Last Friday I walked along the South Bank in London for the first time in over eighteen months, and it was almost as though Covid-19 had never happened. Cases – and deaths – might be just as high as last November, when we were relying on lockdown to stop numbers spiralling out of control, now the country has put its faith squarely in the vaccine programme to do the same. Social distancing and mask wearing seem to have slipped off the agenda.

On the tube up to Monument, the mask wearers were largely in the minority despite TfL making wearing one a condition of carriage. When I finished my walk from Monument to Victoria and got on another tube to take me to my destination at West Kensington, the mask wearers were firmly in the majority; perhaps central London commuters are less mask averse.

The South Bank was busy. Perhaps not as busy as it would have been on a Friday evening pre-pandemic, but busy enough, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that few pubs, coffee shops, or restaurants seemed to have closed, there were even a couple of new places that must have opened only since I was last in town.

 

There were no masks in evidence at Nell’s in West Kensington, where I went to see Fischer-Z in my first proper gig since I saw IQ in November 2019 and the first live music I have paid to see since Joe Stilgoe’s show at The Barbican in January 2020. Fischer-Z – who I first saw back in the 1970s when they supported Dire Straits – are more popular on the continent than in the UK despite founder and lead singer John Watts hailing from Surrey and now living in Brighton, and the crowd was actually quite thin, and while that must have been a disappointment for the band and the venue, it made it a comfortable reintroduction to gig going – for me, at least.

 

Unsurprisingly, drink prices have gone up since I last ventured into a pub in London, but even so, the price of a pint in The Marquis of Granby in Dean Bradley Street, just north of Lambeth Bridge, did take me by surprise a bit, coming in at £6.20, and according to the barmaid, prices are higher on Saturdays and Sundays!

 

Picture by Stephen Harris

Post-gig, it was back to West Kensington Station and the long trot back on the District Line, topped off by a half-hour walk home. By the time I got indoors, Friday had become Saturday, and my phone battery had expired, so I plugged it in to charge and went to bed.

When I got up, the only sign of life on the phone was the green LED that shows that it is fully charged. The phone would not switch on despite simultaneously pressing all the relevant buttons as suggested in the Troubleshoot section of the user manual, or any of the many YouTube videos on the subject. Clearly I needed a new phone.

I have often thought – and I’m sure this has occurred to a lot of people – that we are becoming so reliant on our mobile phones that being without one is much more than a minor inconvenience. In the last few years more and more functions and activities are possible through our phones, so by choice, or increasingly by necessity, much of the mundane, everyday stuff we do, we do with our phones. Our dependence on them has gone way beyond a social media driven habit and now, whole areas of our lives are either simplified by our being able to use a smartphone, or are massively more complex and inconvenient without one.

We pay for things with our phones, we have train tickets and tickets for shows and football matches on on them. It is now possible to have a whole day out just using a smartphone, using the Trainline app for rail tickets, an app like Ringo to pay for car parking, paying for goods and services with Google Pay, using the Wetherspoons app to pay for drinks in a pub, ordering and paying for food at Wagamama, and using a QR code on your mobile to get into a gig at The O2. All of which demands that you have a working smartphone with sufficient battery life, and a 4G signal.

On top of all that, the NHS app on your smartphone gives you access to a record of your Covid vaccination status, and regardless of what anyone says, proof of that is increasingly likely to be required in plenty of places.

 

All of which is fine and dandy – until your phone packs up, which is why I rarely go out without back-up, such as a debit card, some cash, and printed copies of e-tickets.

With my four year old Samsung Galaxy S7 now defunct, but with a phone upgrade due, I phoned my mobile provider to see what they could do. Yes, they could get me a new phone, and get it to me by Wednesday, and on a contract that I was happy with. The only problem was that the only colour phone they could get me by Wednesday was pink. A grey one wouldn’t be available till next month. I declined a pink phone and on Sunday, popped into my local Three store where they had exactly what I wanted, and on a better contract than I’d been offered over the phone.

Luckily, I was only without a phone for twenty-four hours or so and fortunately I didn’t need it for football – when Romford are at home I have the job of updating Football Web Pages through my phone, but this weekend we were away, so I didn’t have that responsibility - but my temporary inability to access my bank account online, or see my NHS COVID Pass, to name but two pieces of vital functionality, showed how reliant on our phones we have become. It’s not until your phone is unusable that you realise how much other stuff you do relies on being able to receive text messages with One Time Passwords and the like.

Having not backed up the photos on my phone for a couple of weeks, I’ve lost a few pictures (I posted some from the gig on Facebook on the way home, so I still have them), but I probably got away lightly, most other stuff was backed up and a couple of frustrating moments apart, getting the new phone set up was relatively painless.

Phone technology is all well and good when it works as it should, but reliance on it introduces lots of points of potential failure: For all of the convenience of smartphones, our dependence on them means that we are in danger of putting all of our eggs in one basket.