Communication is a wonderful thing. It ties us all together in a neat little fabric that is life. It can make the most isolated feel connected. Alexander Graham Bell brought the humble telephone to the modern world. An ingenious device that could send sound through a little wire. It baffles me to think how marvellous these little boxes are. The first telephone I remember was a green little thing with a dial that had to spin round. So you would put your finger in the little hole at say… number 4… dial it all the way down to 0. Then dial a 5…. dial is all the way down to 0, and so on and so forth. Quite novel actually albeit rather clunky by todays standards. If you want to find one in 2018 you need to make your way to the Northern Quarter or your local hipster hangout and no doubt they will be sitting next to a stack of vinyl’s and a dusty penny farthing.
We then moved onto the mobile age. I can remember my father having a battery pack larger than a briefcase for his first mobile. It looked like he had the keys to a nuclear launch and was ready to invade. Things quickly progressed to the age of ‘pay as you go’. Before this mobile phones were far too expensive unless you were a Wall street stock broker. You know the 80’s yuppie cliché? Pay as you go tariffs brought mobile phones to the mass market. The market boomed. My first mobile was a BT Cellnet (precursor to O2). A horrible brick of a thing with a tiny screen with one colour, a dimly lit green background with black writing. I loved it! I would put 10 pounds into my little BT phone and text everyone for my 10p a go. Those thousand texts would last…. a week tops! Then I would have to wait another 3 weeks to get enough picket money to afford my next go.
I was 15 when I got my first mobile. Up to this point everyone passed notes folded up in a triangle and threw them across the classroom so stealth like to ensure teacher wouldn’t catch us. In many ways I miss that excitement and purity of communication. Kids today will probably never know the excitement of the little triangle flying across the classroom to see if your friend from across the room agreed with your solid takedown of whatever teacher had the misfortune of showing up to work that day. Now all witty discussions in the classroom will take place at the touch of a button, aided by Google finding the most important internet meme to fit the occasion. Where is the creativity in that? I do love a good meme though…..
As the years went on I upgraded as mobile technology became more and more sophisticated. It had left its infancy of being just able to make a half decent phone call to more powerful than most laptops. This Siri women who randomly talks to me sometimes sounds terribly knowledgeable. I actually think she is a bit of a know-it-all. Silly cow telling me where the nearest coffee shop is. I know where I’m going SIRI!! I’m feigning being lost to seem a lot more mysterious than I really am! Silly bitch….. I find myself walking an extra mile just in spite of her!
When I moved to Manchester communication was key. As I’ve talked about many times myself and mummy were on the phone most evenings. The conversations would always start with two obligatory questions.
- How was your day?
- What’s your weather like?
The first one seemed logical enough to me, she couldn’t have prior knowledge of this without speaking to me, unless of course my mother lied to me all these years and had a sophisticated spy network that would rival the CIA. That does seem a little unlikely though. Perhaps.
The second questions always puzzled me. The reason for this is because my mother watched the weather forecast every morning and always said, “tomorrow it is going to be raining in Manchester”. She knew better than most meteorologists what cold front was coming from where. In a way it is a very typical British thing. We are obsessed with the weather. Why I will never know as Its not exactly the most stimulating thing to talk about. If we find ourselves in a social setting with unfamiliar people, we default to the weather. If its a customer/client/colleague… we default to the weather? How many conversations start with, “Its very muggy today/We have had a lot of rain/Did you see all the pink ponies falling from the sky this morning?”. Ok so maybe not the last one….
Once we had followed the flowchart of conversation routine to completion we could get into the heart of our chats. These chats could be 5 minutes or 5 hours. Usually the 5 hour scenario involved a bottle of pinot Grigio for me and a merlot for mummy. We could talk about anything together. And we did! Literally anything! My mother was the first person I rang when Donald Trump was announced to have won the election. It was a cold dark morning (mother nature was not pleased… like the rest of us) I rang mummy before I got on the train and her first words were “Don’t tell me, I’m scared to know!”.
Other times we would talked about the most silly of things. Who we loved and hated on the Real housewives of whatever season was on. We could literally spend hours talking about the lives of strangers we had never met. Their were also times were we just talked about life and the mundane things happened. She always had a great catchphrase for me,
“well anything exciting been happening Michael”.
No mummy its been 8 hours since we last talked and 7 of those I’ve been in work.
One time I was walking to the tram stop after work. I looked up and read the neon sign, “Tram out of order, bus replacement”.
That’s all well and good but when your an Irish boy with zero to no sense of direction that’s another thing. I could of asked Siri but unfortunately I think she was feeling a little arrogant since the time I asked her to pick a song at random and I ended up liking her choice. No Siri wasn’t the answer. Plus I couldn’t hang up on mummy and tell her I had to ask Siri how to get this bloody bus. I can hear the questions now “who is Siri and why would she know?”. I decided to walk to the next tram stop and see if their was one running from there. All the while mummy is on the phone getting more and more worried her baby boy is walking the streets of Manchester at night. I assured her that it was only 9pm and most drug dealers and rapists only clock in at 11pm. So I had a couple of hours grace right?
Eventually I got to a stop via halfway round the world (remember how I said my sense of direction is bad, I wasn’t joking!) I caught the glimpse of the tram out of the corner of my eye and ran to it. I was so relieved. Before this I had checked on Google how long the walk would of been. 3hrs. I didn’t particularly fancy this on a Friday evening, or any evening to be honest. So there I was safe and sound on the tram. I hung up from Mummy (I have a real pet hate of people on mobiles on public transport) and When I reached my final stop dialled her up again. We resumed normal conversation etiquette after the drama that had already happened. I look back on that night and it fills my heart up. She was always there for me when I needed her. No matter what time, or what she was doing she would always be free to talk.
So many things have happened since Mummy passed away. Some amazing, some silly and some just plain ordinary. I have wanted to tell her all those things. I would love to be able to ring her after work and have her ask me what the weather in Manchester is like. I would love to have a silly chat about whatever not-so-exciting thing happened that day. I find myself having imaginary conversations with her at night especially. I talk to her.
I know she is listening. She always did.
A Grievers Guide to the Galaxy 