This Is The Modern World

By now one needs to be 'of a certain age' to think that the 'modern world' was that represented by The Jam. Some of us have lived long enough to see 'modern' mean 'old-fashioned'. For me it was mainly represented by Concorde. Modernism as such, that art revolution that happened in 1911, was new enough when one first read T.S. Eliot or were aware of Picasso but poetry, philosophy and the world was already post-modern by then.

I'm not convinced that 'modern' sounds like a new thing to young people now. The New Look, La Nouvelle Vague, The New Wave that meant the Sex Pistols and certainly the New Seekers are definitely old now. It's a bad idea to brand oneself as 'new' because posterity will find the idea hilarious soon enough.

Modern is as old and tweedy as we used to think a Morris Minor was compared to, say, a Ford Capri.

 

Twice today it would have been of some use to have a mobile phone (and been conversant with how it worked) but I'm determined to hang out for as long as possible, e.g. forever, and be the last remaining person on the street, on a train or anywhere else, not transfixed by the tiny screen. I spend too much time in front of this quite big screen as it is.

The bank want my mobile number to text me a code to verify online purchases. We'll deal with that one day. More pressingly, making my way towards the final stages of the Collected Poems, I thought I'd investigate and maybe even set up the account to publish the book as a kindle with the facility of a hard copy. But, D'oh, the second level of verification required involves the same thing, a mobile number to send me a code. One can alternatively create such a code by downloading an app but after trying to follow several lists of instructions to do that, I can't waste a whole Friday night failing to achieve anything and I'd rather do this.

I am the new version of the Morris Minor driver, stuck somewhere in the past. I am a patient man, generally, and willing to try but sometimes maybe I'm unwilling to compromise and whereas I don't understand why people have objections to being vaccinated, I have my own precious objections to having to have a mobile phone.

So the Collected Poems might not be a kindle after all. It might just be a pdf document. So be it if the world won't come to meet its olde worlde intransigence.