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Diary
Caroline Chartres
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| Time travel THE Beloved’s Year Of Not Flying was up just in time for him to represent the Church of England at the funeral of the Archbishop of Athens. Having to find alternative means of transport does at least force you to think about how you travel; and the lack of legroom and the queues generated by additional security precautions mean that flying is frequently a disagreeable experience anyway. There are obviously, however, times when it is necessary: going to a funeral on the other side of Europe is one of them. The alternative forms of transport take so much longer that you risk having to set off before the individual concerned has actually expired — which could lead to some embarrassing questions on arrival. Self-examination I WAS buying a new mobile phone. The helpful assistant told me cheerfully that it was no longer necessary to supply two forms of ID: I could take a test online instead. The computer would ask me questions about my own identity; if it decided that I was indeed who I claimed to be, I could proceed with my purchase. There was something unnerving about taking a test on myself, despite the assistant’s reassurances that it was in multiple-choice format, and that it was not necessary to get full marks. This turned out to be just as well: I scored 50 per cent, which was classified as good enough for me to leave clutching my new phone. But the experience was disorientating, shifting as it does the burden of proof from the requirement to supply supporting evidence for one’s name and address to the need to prove one’s identity to an apparently omniscient (and omnipotent) computer. I could not decide which aspect of the experience disturbed me most: the amount of information about me (accurate or otherwise) that was readily available; the assumed infallibility of the computer despite the fallibility of the system (it’s perfectly possible to score 50 per cent by guesswork on multiple-choice questions); or the way in which the whole process simply underlined my own ongoing identity crisis. Kitchen cabinet PART OF my attempts at a greener lifestyle include trying to reduce our reliance on damaging detergents. My mother has had some success with “eco balls”, one of the green alternatives, and helpfully scribbled down the contact details of a recommended supplier. It took me a while to work out why the Beloved had expressed surprise that I had Ed Balls’s telephone number on my dressing-table. . . Mind the gap AT Liverpool Street station, the train company has helpfully provided an information board: “Where is that place?” It lists the places visitors to London might want to find, and shows their nearest Tube stations. Among a dozen London hospitals, ten football grounds, two dozen hotels, and about 30 West End cinemas, the largest category is “Places of interest”. It includes museums, art galleries, and other attractions ranging from the Tower of London to Madame Tussauds by way of Abbey Road Studios and the Kew Bridge Steam Museum. Startlingly, not a single religious building appears anywhere in the list: you might have expected that St Paul’s Cathedral or Westminster Abbey at least would merit inclusion, if only as important tourist attractions. On a recently acquired large-scale Ordnance Survey map, a significant local landmark was conspicuous by its absence. Churches are now apparently listed as “PW” (Place of Worship): the old symbols of the square or circle surmounted by a cross (which provided useful historical and trigonometrical information) are nowhere to be seen. Perhaps our whole culture is having an identity crisis. Sins of the fathers NUMBER TWO daughter arrived at school to find the assembly devoted to a presentation of the Bishop of London’s Lent plan. She kept her head down as the head rehearsed the 40 points. (Forty! Your heart would sink at 17.) Then, to her horror, the head announced that the Bishop would speak for himself — on a specially prepared DVD. The daughter was saved by a technological failure: her father mouthed silently as the school filed out, and she ran straight into her French teacher, who said, grinning: “I saw you getting out of the car this morning. . .” In other respects, however, my attempts to be greener appear to be bearing fruit in unexpected ways. As I emerged from a series of meetings with Number Two son’s new teachers, he said quizzically: “You do know you’ve got green highlighter on the end of your nose, don’t you?” |
