ia play

I recently completed an online survey on the Guardian website which made me realise what an utter disappointment I must be to the advertisers involved. The whole survey seemed to be focused on establishing the breadth of my electronic life and it really brought home to me how far from an early-adopter I am.

I didn’t get a mobile till 2000 and it still doesn’t access the internet or take pictures. I’ve only had digital camera a year. I don’t have digital telly, don’t download music, don’t own an iPod (or…whisper it…another MP3 player) , and I really don’t want an iPhone. Really.

In my household our wishlist includes a pig (and the farm to put it on), a telescope and a Malamute. Buying throw-away electronics just fritters away the pig fund.

Would quite like an EEE though.

Also on the Thinking Allowed ‘Hoodies’ episode that I mentioned a while back was a piece on city planning.The piece covers ‘the traditional and futuristic notions of what makes a good city’ and decisions that we now perceive to have been destructive but at the time were motivated by a desire to get rid of Victoriana, to build better roads etc.

It seems that one generation’s modernisation is often the next’s wanton destruction. The romanticism that my generation has for things from my grandparents time horrifies my parents. They see it as a retrograde attitude. They have none of the nostalgia for period properties & antique fittings, they merely associate them with the hardships and limitations of their childhoods (cold & drafty houses, filled with dark wood and laboursome devices). Their values are of the 60s, warm, clean, light modern houses, scandanavian furniture and labour-saving, electronic devices.

My mother-in-law was amused to see we have a manual coffee-grinder and politely inquired if we knew there were electric versions available. We got it partly because we’ve been looking at our electricity consumption and also trying to buy devices that last longer. I’ve been increasing shocked at how many electronic devices I end up chucking. But there’s also a kind of motivation that I call the From Scratch Diet i.e. you can eat as much as you like of anything that you make from scratch. Sod Atkins…bread can’t make you fat if you had to knead the bloody dough yourself. Not that coffee makes you fat but you get the idea.

Mum just thinks we’re on some weird puritanical kick.

I’ve just read John Naish’s Enough. It arrived on my desk at work with it’s dazzling tag-line “ever get the feeling that you’ve had enough?”. Rather apt timing.

At times Enough seemed like a greatest hits of the happiness & modernity movement, featuring Mihály Csíkszentmihályi (Flow), Epicurus, Martin Seligman (Authentic Happiness), the jam experiment (also seen in Paradox of Choice), and Stephen Johnson (Everything Bad is Good For You). I skipped quite a few bits as a result.

But I really liked the stuff about personal sabbaths. Mine seems to involved baking bread and sitting on top of the rabbit hutch.And it’s got a nice ending. I get very uppity if books don’t end well.