Simon Cowell and his phone-free life
IT TAKES guts to plunge into the fray when muggers are beating up a delivery driver and ramping up the violence by breaking a bottle over the terrified man’s head. In the year that London’s murder statistics eclipsed New York’s for the first time, most seasoned capital-dwellers keep their heads down, mind their own business and move swiftly on while dialling 999.
Not so Benedict Cumberbatch, who leapt to the driver’s defence, causing the four men to turn on him and attempt to smash him to smithereens. In a location seconds away from Baker Street, home of his most famous TV character Sherlock Holmes, Cumberbatch conducted himself with considerable courage and vast dollops of public-spirited bravery. Commentators and observers may have spoken on the surreal sight of Sherlock fighting off hoodlums but Benedict knows he’s no superhero, just an actor with a conscience and the derring-do to act on it. Well done.
SHOCK! Horror! Not to mention gargantuan shedloads of disbelief! Simon Cowell hasn’t used his phone for 10 whole months. That’s right. He hasn’t gawped at the device, snapped a picture of the back of his own neck and posted it, scrolled through photos of a wedding he wasn’t invited to, watched a cat falling in a bin, been scammed by a purveyor of fake Viagra, “liked” someone else’s croissant, summoned an Uber, checked his current account, scanned a selection of curtain linings, chatted at length with either of his brothers or used the thing to make a couple of poached eggs. He hasn’t, if you believe him and I most certainly do, bothered even to cast a fleeting glance at the telephone’s direction.
Before we plunge Gentle Reader, headlong into the exhilarating details of how much happier, bouncier, jumping with joy and firmly centred “in the moment” our favourite mogul and TV judge now feels, let me refresh your waning memory.
Rewind just a couple of decades and Simon’s phoneless existence was pretty much the fate of the overwhelming majority of British menfolk. Even when we resorted to party lines, phone boxes and placed home telephones in the glacial Arctic hinterland of the unheated hall, women were prone to having lengthy, meandering and – if they could afford it – almost infinite chats.
In 1967 I’d depart for school leaving my mother, receiver clamped to her ear, animatedly gossiping with my grandma Sybil. Nine hours later I’d return. She’d have shifted location from bedroom to lounge but the dog and bone remained glued to her shell-like and the chatter continued unabated. Mothers cherished and perfected the art of painting their toe-nails, chopping onions, even breast-feeding without interrupting their conversational flow.
Fathers were an entirely different matter. Chaps didn’t do chatter. What’s more they didn’t do answering phones, polite small-talk or asking the state of relatives’ lumbago. Their relationship with the phone was tetchy at best, at worst openly hostile. They excelled at tapping their watches, looking affronted and pointing out that it wasn’t yet 6pm, costs were extortionate, “so put the bloody thing down young lady”.
They were magnificent at ignoring a ringing phone forcing you to leap dripping from the bath and sprint through the house leaving puddles in your wake. If absolutely forced to lift the thing they’d yell: “Who is it? Who? Oh, your mother. Hang on a minute I’ll get [insert name of female partner].” If they had to use the phone at work they did so with brisk efficiency. Blokes did not consider telephone use a form of recreation.
I know these days phones are so much more than phones – except mine which cost £25, isn’t connected to the internet and doesn’t take pictures. So much more is correct. They are drains, distractions, timewasters, money pits and the primary means of alienating people from their own lives, fanning the flames of inadequacy and driving a constant wedge between lovers, friends and parents and children.
Simon Cowell has adored his phone-free existence – deep down, wouldn’t we all?