Generation gap goes digital

Barefoot on gravel. The familiar pain acting like a time machine whizzing me back to childhood and the long summer holidays. It’s not by intention that I stand on the small stones, just the repeated accident of taking off shoes and forgetting where they are in the midst of a sunny day.

As my sole hits the spiky pebbles, my memory fires and I can hear the wood pigeons in the large cedar hedge at my grandparents, see the insects blurring my sight, smell the bright yellow flowers of the broom.

My father had the academic holidays and we’d spend weeks with relatives in the Highlands. Foreign travel is wonderful but nothing compares to long days on the hills of Highland Perthshire, the fields of the Black Isle or the magic that lies to the West.

The time trained my imagination to wander far and wide.

I blame the rain – it forces us to conjure up worlds beyond the water dripping down the window pane.

The best memories are of the outside, when the weather was dry.

You’d come in for meals and sleep, to dodge the midges or watch flickery sport that some adult had on the TV.

None of that compared with the maze to be run through the towering willow herb or the games played on gritty tarmac.

I recall a rare moment when my father decided to come in for a swim – against character and habit, he sat with his feet in the loch, the startling pink and white of his skin dulled by the peaty brown of the water.

Now I am the large pinky white male with the red face and feet awkward on the stoney bed of the loch.

Playing outside has led to a lifetime of mountains and long walks, of foolish swimming in icy burns.

My mum likes to think it instilled resilience – the ability to keep oneself occupied, to travel safely and be independent. So I take my own child on summer holidays in the Highlands, in the belief it does some good.

She can inflate a small boat like the best, open and close the field gates to the shore and plunge into the depths (though she insists on a wet suit – the jessie). However, the outside competes with the charms of her phone.

At some point in the recent past the words “Is there wi-fi?” became a common phrase, as much a part of holidays as “are we there yet?” and “dad, don’t be embarrassing”.

It seemed easy when she was small to sit her in front of nursery TV and at no cost to her well-being— I read to her and when she was able to, she read to herself.

In the illogical science of raising a child, the goodness of books seems to outweigh any harm from TV.

And from a young age we would go outside and find daft things to do.

Yet the screen has proved a magical lure, a siren that can call her from any other activity into its pixels.

I do recall my mum telling me off for watching TV on a summer’s day in the 1970s – perhaps she thought I too was missing out.

But old war movies on BBC2 seem somehow more benign than the insistent demand of the phone or the tablet. The war movies didn’t talk back – accept to my imagination – but the modern screen is in constant dialogue with its user.

When my daughter curls up on the sofa, she does so with her world in attendance. From the first thing in the morning to last at night, she can be in a digital conversation with someone who is not in there – not in the room, not the house, not even in the country. It is a conversation I cannot hear.

Is it rude to text and snapchat? Surely not when it is so normal. It may even be rude to stop something so commonplace and habitual.

Is it that I feel left out – the equivalent of someone whispering in the corner beyond my hearing?

There’s some of that – the sense that what is happening here and now is in competition with the screen.

However, I suspect she thinks of the messages as the here and now – parallel voices of equal worth in the same dimension.

Maybe it is just that I don’t recall as a child having that much chat. The voices of my childhood were as much in my head as heard by anyone else – was that any better?

My worry is what does this all mean for her and her generation.

Will they be permanently at a distance from nature, forever wedded to the constant companionship of digital chatter, dependent on the emotional reassurance of the screen?

Perhaps this is just the stuff of parenting and age – the low hum of worry about life somehow spoiling her life.

Last week my daughter was standing alone outside, talking to herself and moving her hands, lost in some thought. Skinny limbs, smile on face and barefoot to the world.

I looked on silently from the window, happy – and then my own phone went ping.

Will they be permanently at a distance from nature, forever wedded to the constant companionship of digital chatter?

Smartphones and tablets have opened up a world far beyond the reach of most people’s childhoods.