modern life

Striding through London, heading for the Playhouse Theatre, I came across Big Ben. A giant, golden clock in the centre of London, framed by the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament, you can hardly miss it.

And yet one man, one of tens of thousands of suited and booted businesspeople power-walking around our nation’s capital every single day, managed to overlook the clock entirely. Standing at a crossing, he slipped his hand into his pocket, pulled out his phone and checked the time before dropping the gadget back into his pocket.

Flabbergasted isn’t a word I use very often, but it just about sums up my face as it looked in that moment. He checked the time. On his phone. In the shadow of Big Ben. And he wasn’t the only one.

A need for speed, perhaps? But surely, with speed in mind, it takes less time to tilt your head up and look at an actual, physical clock, than it does to go to the effort of finding your phone. Is the sight of that mammoth clock so everyday to the city-slickers of London town that it just doesn’t feature on their radars anymore?

It’s a sad testament to the hustle and bustle of modern life that we assume technology will automatically provide us with the speediest results, the most efficient of solutions and the best preservation of our precious memories…

I know I’m guilty of it at times. Mostly at events, where I have been known – not often, I might add – to stand with my phone held aloft, focusing on taking pictures as souvenirs rather than on making memories from the spectacle on stage, the atmosphere of the crowd and the company of friends.

Sometimes a memory is enhanced by not having 1001 photographs capturing every moment that you missed in person.

It’s a lesson often learned the hard way: all it takes is for one tiny blip and you’ve lost every single picture, only to then find that you can’t remember a thing about the evening for yourself…because you were too busy making sure your camera was on the right settings for the light, or focusing correctly. Not a single memory of sight or sound or smell or touch, and no-one to blame but yourself.

When did we become so reliant on our cameras, our iPads, our fancy phones, I wonder?

Take a moment to stop and notice your surroundings. Take in the details with your own eyes rather than the megapixels of your iPhone, and remember those vibrant colours. Take a deep breath and let yourself hear more than the snap of a camera phone.

Life moves so fast these days. Everyone wants to find the fastest, most efficient way of performing even the most everyday tasks; like telling the time, for example. Modern technology is a wonderful thing, and I certainly couldn’t be without it, but reliable it ain’t. That moment when your phone inexplicably crashes or freezes? It’s happened more times than I care to recall over the last twelve months.

How many times has Big Ben broken in that time, I wonder?