In Screenistan, and almost lost

At the age of 97 Prince Philip has surrendered his driving licence. At the age of 61 I have not. But I have taken to driving more slowly. Not because I drive worse than once I did, nor yet because the Queen has had words with me, but because I am reluctant to kill.

I don’t want to kill hedgehogs (though I see fewer of these than formerly), and I don’t want to kill the quail chicks that scamper in front of my wheels these hot summer mornings, though they seem always to escape at the last half-second with a turn of speed astonishing in things so tiny. And I particularly don’t want to kill, for a whole mass of moral, legal and frankly sentimental reasons, young people.

Young people occupy the same physical world as hedgehogs, quail and cars. But mentally a lot of them have emigrated. They’ve gone to live on the internet. Though they may walk the streets of Christchurch, their heads are in Screenistan.

This morning I drove with the dog to buy bread, and on Settlers Crescent (and I am sorry for those of you who enjoy an apostrophe, but that is how the council likes it) a young woman in red shorts and a yellow T-shirt, absorbed to the core of her being by the phone that she held in her hand, stepped off the kerb and into the path of my car.

Had I not leapt on the brakes with the same unhesitating commitment that the former President Clinton used to demonstrate when leaping on interns, time would have come to a halt for this young woman.

(Even as I shudder at the memory of President Clinton I realise that this young woman was not yet born when he was sleazing round the Oval Office. And I further realise that when Clinton was president, so very recently it seems, a phone was still a phone and the internet an infant. How fast the years run by. How great the recent changes. Sic transit Monica Lewinsky.)

Quite what was engrossing the young woman I cannot say: whether she was approving the photographs of her friends’ meals or whether she was basking in the approval of photographs of her own meals or whether she was reading the fierce illiteracies of people short on knowledge but long on prejudice, I don’t know. The point is that the world as filtered through her phone held her attention. The actual world of hedgehogs and approaching Mitsubishis didn’t.

‘‘She twinkled her fingers at me as one might to an imaginary rabbit ...’’

It was a near thing but I stopped the car in time. And I was just calming my upset nerves and wiping the dog from the windscreen when I noticed that the young woman was continuing across the road, her head still bent over her phone. She was oblivious to her almost-death.

‘‘Hello,’’ I said through the driver’s window, ‘‘hello hello hello.’’ She looked up and around as if she’d heard her guardian angel call. This wasn’t, as it happens, that far from the truth, but when she saw me her face sank. ‘‘Can I help you?’’ she said.

I thought of saying that she had the subject and object the wrong way round in that inquiry, but saw no point in it. ‘‘Have a nice day,’’ I said. In response she twinkled her fingers at me as one might to an imaginary rabbit, and returned to the consuming reality of her phone.

And I reflected as I drove away that the gap in years between me and her was roughly the same as the gap in years between me and Prince Philip. But one gap seemed a great deal wider than the other.