No tuneful meadows of Spotify here, I walk the lonely beat on Apple Music
Apps hate me. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s my age, or my gender or my general social standing — perhaps the internet has some niggling sense that 53-year-old mothers have no business dabbling in apps anyway — but for whatever reason and on whatever phone I have, they just don’t want to work for me.
Take Spotify. I was so early to the Spotify party that I called a holiday cat after the nascent music streaming service back in 2010, when people hardly knew about it. And if you were to look at my phone, you’d see its distinctive black and green logo upside grinning back at you from the screen. But open it, reader, and it’ll advise you that you’re just a couple of steps short of finishing installing it, before it invites you down a rabbit warren of lost e-mails, non-existent passwords and dead ends. I’ve asked The Boy — who is young and male and therefore favoured by the internet — to sort it out and even he can’t, and he very nearly has a degree in that sort of thing. So while the rest of the world shares Spotify playlists and frolics through tuneful meadows, I am restricted to walking the lonely beat on Apple Music, the Betamax of streaming services. When I signed up for Apple, years ago now, they gave me the family plan, which is slightly more expensive than the individual subscription, though obviously I’ve never been able to install it. Besides, the rest of the family (and the world) are on Spotify.
My current phone arrived with the Sky Sports app already downloaded because that was part of the plan I signed up for. To be honest, it wasn’t a selling point because much as though I’d like to watch live football on my phone, I knew in my heart of hearts it would never work for me. Sure enough, if you press it, literally nothing happens. Again, it’s as though Sky Sports saw the cut of my online jib and decided it wasn’t for me.
I really could have done with Revolut working out though. For starters, it seemed like the only way I could ever prise any money whatsoever out of the two older lodgers and freeloaders, and since more and more people that I give money to (the two older lodgers and freeloaders, for example) are using it, it would have been nice to give it a spin. And I did, on the first day. I gave The Boy €15 and paid my personal trainer for a couple of sessions and all seemed right with the world. Then it just stopped working. When I tried to top it up, it told me the bank couldn’t authenticate my Visa card.
Because I really wanted it to work for me the way it does for normal people, I actually phoned the bank who said to phone Revolut
— a laugh, as apparently it’s not run by humans — and their bot told me to phone the bank again who said to phone Vodafone who said it’s our fault but we don’t know how to fix it but phone the bank again and ask them to send you e-mail verifications and I did and they said no. So now that’s another shiny logo on the screen of my phone that goes nowhere.
You would probably think, then, that I couldn’t possibly have the BBC iPlayer on my phone. But I do. On the basis that I fear there might be some legal ambiguity about all of this, suffice to say that a close relative who once worked in China told me how to fool the British Broadcasting Corporation into thinking my phone was in the UK. I think, in this case, my status probably worked in my favour because the BBC loves 53-year-old women and makes acres of programmes just for us, all of which I can effortlessly watch on my phone, even though my phone settings are in Irish, so every time I want to watch anything I have to answer a short series of questions from the BBC IN IRISH about whether I am over 18 and have a tv licence. But then I am free to watch every episode of Fleabag and an apparently infinite number of other shows besides. The Close Relative also has the iPlayer on her laptop but the BBC instantly rumbled me when I tried to get it on mine, which was pretty much what I expected given my track record with all things appy. In any event, small victories, the internet decrees, are all people like me really deserve.