On Telephones That Do Not Work

[avevale_intelligencer]

Glancing out of the kitchen window, I happened to see a child of about seven or eight walking past, talking earnestly into a mobile phone; and it occurred to me that when I was about seven or eight, it would have been a toy telephone (and not a mobile either), but that this one was almost certain to be a real, functional one. And I was overcome by a wave of sadness, not because I had never had a real telephone when I was seven or eight, but because this child had probably never had a toy one.

So great is our hurry to push, pull, drag, throw, bully and cajole children into adulthood these days that we give them all the things we have, and we make sure they work. I have seen little petrol-driven go-karts for the use of toddlers (under supervision, please gods), make-up sets for three-year-olds, computers for babies who have not learned to spell yet, and possibly never will. It can surely only be a matter of time before we start palming off our less pleasurable work on them, and then we will have come full circle; only instead of sending children down the pit or up the chimney, we will sell their eager parents the Kiddy Kall Centre, complete with real telephone on which real customers can call up and arrange their car insurance with Damien, aged six.

I had a car when I was a child. It was blue, and it worked by pedals, and I had a lot of fun with it, and I learned that one's speed is directly proportional to the effort one puts in, a valuable life lesson it took me a long time to unlearn. If it had had an engine, I would have been terrified; but even more disastrously, I would have been deprived of the fun of pretending it had an engine. I also had a toy telephone. It was red, and plastic, and in due course I took it apart and added ping pong balls and turned it into a robot as you do; but before that I had derived far more pleasure from pretending to talk to people on it than I could ever have got from actually talking to people. For one thing, the range of opportunities for conversation is so much wider when one is talking to oneself, on a telephone that does not work.

Similarly, I cannot help but think that if the parents in the excellent song "Mommy, Can I Have A Spaceship?" had presented their preschool child with a fully functioning interstellar probe vessel, the song would have ended rather differently, and possibly much sooner; and the child, if he survived, would very likely have gone to work in a bank instead. The benefits to be gained in childhood from games of "pretend" are too many and various to be listed here, but most of them may be summarised under one general head; the freedom to exercise the imagination to the full in the knowledge that one is safe from the consequences of one's mistakes.

These days are different, of course. No-one is safe, the hedges are heaving with paedophiles, and it is vitally important that a child should be able to call for help on a real phone, zoom off in a real Formula 1 racing car, or in the extreme blow away its assailant with a real Walther PPK. There is no time for games of "pretend." Life is real, life is earnest, and life starts when you learn to walk. The child I saw through the window was probably contacting her broker to adjust her investment portfolio in the light of the collapse of Lehman Brothers. But I cannot escape the thought that she might have found it more pleasant, and possibly even more educational, if she had been talking to the man in the moon, on a telephone that did not work.

Comments

[lutos.livejournal.com]

I think there's is a virtue in being bored - it is learning patience, and tranquility from virtual or audio influences.
You see what happens when the power goes out - people (me included) are angry at first, then they have no idea what to do (especially when it's dark outside), then slowly there's a time of rethinking of other things to do. Power failures are my time of doing things under candlelight that I usually claim never to have the time for.

A mobile phone for emergency - I'll understand that. Going out with a befriended family and spending the rest of the dinner watching the kids sending messages or pics or Dad taking phonecalls from friends is not my idea of ideal communciation with people.:p

[stevieannie.livejournal.com]

Sadly, when on a long car journey, boredom does not teach my children patience. It makes them torture each other and scream.

I deal *very* badly with boredom, and I don't think it has ever taught me anything. I'm very capable of turning off tvs, stereos and computers etc. and reading, playing a game or making music. I do it very regularly. I am, however, a kender by nature and firmly convinced that if there is such a thing as "hell" then for me, it will consist of a blank room with nothing at all in it. For all eternity. *SHUDDER*

Reading in a car was never an option for me, neither is anything with a screen - anything that keeps my eyes still whilst my body is moving (however slightly) makes me throw up in very short order. I'm a big fan of car stereos for this very reason!

[aunty_marion]

Oh, we were all lucky! None of really tended to get car-sick, so the first stop on any longish journey was the newsagent, for a selection of comics or magazines (usually something different from the ones we took every week); and we were happy to have an I-Spy book with us and try and tick off things from those. Playing 'I-spy' (the game), though, was not usually popular. But there were other amusements, like making up words from cars' registration plates, and 'sixpence for the first one to see a rabbit/the sea/Kirkby church spire/whatever". And - I'm a generation older than you, nearly, I think! - we didn't have any sort of radio in the car, unless Dad brought his portable along, with the special aerial extension that hooked onto the window.

I can't remember for my sisters particularly, but I've always been happy just watching the scenery go past out of a window; I can be making up stories, or thinking about other things at the same time.