My dad spent Christmas in the Canary Islands with his sister, Jennifer, and her family. They bickered, as they enjoyed doing, about whose hotel room had the better view, so my father leaned over his balcony to take a photo, and promptly dropped his phone on to the concrete four storeys below.
Dad had once been quite keen on technology, and had spent the early Eighties learning BASIC on a ZX Spectrum that wouldn’t load. But at some point he’d decided he was too old to learn new things. I was with him one afternoon when the alarm on his phone went off. He silenced it, but three minutes later it happened again. When I asked what the alarm signified, he just shrugged, “It’s been doing that for weeks.” Somehow he’d set his phone to beep twice each Tuesday afternoon, and had simply accepted it as an immutable fact of the universe.
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