In Praise of Modern Britain

From video calls with family to copious online orders of gin and board games, Brian Viner is thankful for modern technology during a pandemic

Technology is a wonderful thing, says Brian Viner

MANY months ago, before lockdown, my wife was clocked speeding on the M5. She’d hate me to give you the impression that she disappeared over the horizon like the Road Runner: it was 58 mph in a 50 mph zone. Still, speeding is speeding. Given the option of points on her licence or a speed awareness course, she chose the latter.

Then came lockdown. An email arrived from the National Driver Offender Retraining Scheme telling her she would now have to do their course via Zoom. I don’t know if anyone at NDORS recognised the delicious irony. They’d be teaching the perils of driving too fast on a forum named Zoom, a word for speed no less onomatopoeic than “whoosh” or “whizz”. I tweeted this on my iPhone. Someone on Twitter replied, wondering whether the Zoom course “might crash”?

All the pivotal technological terms in that little anecdote – Zoom, Twitter, tweet, iPhone, email, crash – were unknown to us not so many years ago, at least in the context in which we now use them. I’ve been known to lament the way in which huge technological leaps have entirely changed the national discourse, perhaps even our national identity. But where would we have been in lockdown (another word that has recently taken on a whole new meaning) without them?

Needless to add, for anyone who has lost loved ones, endured serious health problems or suffered a seismic financial hit, the COVID-19 pandemic could not have been worse. But for those of us who have stayed relatively unscathed – and I’m touching wood here – imagine how much harder it would have been even 10 or 20 years ago, let alone 40 or 50.

Technology – that widely maligned word – has made it bearable. I’d prefer not to be further enriching Jeff Bezos, but right through the strictest phase of lockdown Amazon Prime was a lifeline for me and my family: next-day delivery of everything from books and records to board games and gin kept us if not sane (I don’t want you to think our sanity is entirely dependent on Cluedo and treble G&Ts), then certainly cheerful.

Of course, without warehouse staff and drivers prepared to work long hours on low wages, none of it would have happened. Nobody should overlook their contribution to keeping the country ticking through its darkest hours since wartime.

I have a friend who, thanks to them, was able at the click of a button to do all the food shopping for her elderly parents 400 miles away. That’s an incredible thing. How would we have managed before Ocado and all the other delivery services?

Consider the remarkable advances in communication and connectivity. If you’re as old as I am, you’ll remember something called the trunk call. In our house there was an aura of suspicion, even fear, around the trunk call. Long-distance phone calls were for a Sunday morning only, when my dad had a weekly catch-up with his sister in Essex. Now we can talk to Australia for free. If we Skype, Zoom or FaceTime, we can see each other, too.

Thanks to lockdown, the videoconferencing company Zoom was, by the end of May this year, worth more than the top three US airlines combined. It kept people working, enabled family reunions and quizzes, and in my case, allowed me, from my home in rural Herefordshire, to take part in a send-off for a dear old friend who died, aged 95, in Atlanta,

Georgia. Under normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have made it over there for her memorial service. As it was, I was able to give a eulogy.

The obvious paradox in all this is that advancing technology has been responsible for the extremity of the pandemic. Clearly, the rapid spread of the coronavirus owes plenty to the growth of international air travel. But it’s worth contemplating how things like microchips and satellites have so utterly transformed our entertainment options, just in time for the moment when we were all so unexpectedly forced to batten down our hatches.

That age-old whinge that there’s nothing worth watching on the telly has gone the way of typewriters, telegrams and trunk calls. Between the likes of Sky, Netflix and YouTube, we can watch virtually any movie or TV drama we want, whenever we want. In our house, on which our three grown-up children descended for three whole months, that felt like another godsend. It wasn’t just gin that fortified us – it was comedy, too.

For all the above reasons, while I fervently wish the pandemic hadn’t happened, I’m relieved it happened when it did – in modern Britain.

“We can watch virtually any movie or TV drama we want”