YES There are two particularly terrific scenes in this summer's cinematic blockbusters. In Twister, which is all about the forces of nature, the baddie is a tornado-chaser. We know he's a baddie because he's incredibly high-tech and he travels with a fleet of sleek, black vans. The goodie, meanwhile, who's also a tornado-chaser, stands around Oklahoma sifting soil samples through his fingers and sniffing the wind. That's how we know he's a goodie.
And in Independence Day, where the baddies are really villainous, the worldwide forces of good are gathered together by a quaint system of communication. It's called Morse code. It did this old Luddite's heart good to see all those soldiers tap-tapping away, surrounded by their redundant gizmos. When the (computer) chips are down, you see, you just can't rely on machines to help you out.
I've never trusted technology. I think it complicates things horribly. I can't drive, I don't have a television or a video or a washing machine or a hi-fi system or a functioning cooker, and I've only just bought a fridge after three years because I've moved to the 27th floor of a building and I don't trust the lifts. If I'm going to be stranded up here, like all those people during Malaysia's blackout a few weeks ago, then I suppose I might as well have a decent supply of milk and Haagen-Dazs for the first couple of hours. Then the freezer section will flood the floor, short-circuit my kettle and I'll disappear in a blue flash.
I spent the first 10 years of my journalistic life writing everything in longhand which I then typed up. It was time-consuming but the worst that could happen was that my pen ran out of ink. It was a happy existence. When I came to Hong Kong, I had to get used to computers. Stories were sucked into the outer vortex, whole paragraphs were obliterated; last week, I lost access to my print manager. The icon just disappeared along with my sense of well-being. The gut-wrenching mystery of it was the second-worst thing - what was worse was realising how reliant I was on a beastly machine.
Of course, like horses, they see you coming and get uppity. For the whole of last summer, I didn't have a telephone. Everyone who rang sounded like Donald Duck, except when the telephone engineer was present. There is no quicker route to unhinged sanity than to have an expert tell you, after three visits, that the technology's working perfectly when you know it isn't. Naturally, they discovered a fault at the exchange but to this day I answer the phone with a degree of hesitancy, waiting for the quack.
Last night, my alarm clock lost two hours. The magnetic stripe on my bank card is playing up. Again. The MTR seems to be falling apart. I stand a good chance of being brained by a falling satellite. And all this is supposed to make life easier? NO Do you know how the Romans used to remove teeth? They used to hack a hole into the tooth and put a whole peppercorn in it. As saliva was absorbed into the peppercorn it expanded rapidly, splitting the tooth into shards which were then pulled out with pincers. I hate the dentist, but give me the drugs and the drill any day.
