It’s good to talk during a pandemic… even if you’re generation text
I’m a millennial ( just) and it’s often said that we don’t like phone calls. We love our phones, don’t get me wrong. Try to separate a millennial from their mobile and she will lash out like a tigress in danger of losing a cub. But actually speak via a phone? No, thank you. We appreciate Alexander Graham Bell’s efforts but we’d rather use our smartphones to send messages via WhatsApp and spend literally hours scrolling through Instagram. There, we’ll stick up intimate details of our daily lives for others to see – our breakfast, our lipstick, a new lamp on our bedside table – but in no way do we want to have a real conversation with those others. Don’t be disgusting.
Until the past week or so, that is, when the coronavirus restrictions started and I felt an increasing urge to hit the green dial button instead of tap
out a few emojis by way of reply. Now I want to speak to everyone, all the time. I seem to have become chattier than Graham Norton. My father and stepmother are on lockdown in Spain; my mother is holed up in West Sussex with Beano the terrier for company, which is all very well but he isn’t much of a conversationalist. I ring them constantly, along with other family members and various friends.
At such a time, one imagines these might be heartfelt, grandiloquent
conversations where we call those we love most for comfort and succour, perhaps for pepping up with a few Churchillian bon mots. You know, really stirring stuff that charges the vitals and makes us believe we’ll all get through this together. But I’m afraid to say two days ago I called my brother simply to declare that I’d bought the last bunch of bananas in the Sainsbury’s petrol station.
I’m currently living with my stepsister and brother-in-law and, on another evening this week, while eating pasta around the kitchen table (with a breathtaking lack of selfdiscipline, we’ve already ripped into our fusilli supplies), we called our parents in Catalonia and put the phone on loudspeaker for a five-way conversation. Nobody listened to a single thing anybody else said and there was constant shouting over one another but even this was reassuring: the world is in chaos and yet familial bickering over which boxset is best will continue. (The West Wing – and I don’t want to hear another word about it).
I can’t say exactly the same joy arises from the video call. Last Tuesday, it took my agent, my book editor and me 37 minutes to get the technology to work. When we finally connected, I was alarmed by the others’ professionalism – hair brushed, glasses on, a lick of mascara. I, meanwhile, was dressed in my bicycling bib with Lycra straps running over my shoulders and tufts of my fringe sticking towards the ceiling. Still, once I’d angled my laptop screen to shrink my nose, there was solace in chatting about something other than supermarket queues and infection rates.
Who can tell whether this moment will cure our phone aversion forever but I’m not sure that matters. Right now, it’s a boon. Just remember to get dressed properly before dialling into the conference call.