Back in a Bit

Somehow, I’ve become one of them.

The first mistake, I think, was to buy a Mac. My reasoning at the time, I maintain, was perfectly reasonable: having worked with computers for more than a decade, I was thoroughly sick of looking at their insides. So when a well-dressed bunch of Californians offered a sexy-looking powerhouse of a laptop that was, most importantly, welded closed, I handed over my credit card on bended knee. Even though it’s no more reliable than anything I had before, being able to overcome the urge to explore its irritating nuances down to the last component is an enormous relief. I continue to earn a living by fixing difficult problems but, in my head, keeping my own laptop working is someone else’s problem. Hoorah! But the Californians won’t let it end there. The laptop may be a silver box full of wires and circuit boards, but they insist on going around telling everyone it’s a “lifestyle choice”.

Then I rented an flat. When choosing somewhere to live, we all apply our own priorities: there are emotional considerations, some to do with taste, maybe also public perception, but also a whole raft of very practical thoughts. Me? I couldn’t care less about the fluffy stuff - I just wanted something modern (easy to keep presentable and less chance of things going wrong, or so I thought) with a bit of elbow-room, and well-connected by road without being submerged in traffic jams. Not surprisingly then, I ended up in a fairly spacious apartment in a modern housing estate that links straight onto a motorway junction, and not too far from my regular office. But the longer I live here, the more my eyes open to the Porsche Cayennes and the Audi TTs that decorate every drive and clutter every cul-de-sac. Once again, my overly-practical rationale has landed me right in the middle of a bold lifestyle statement. You can see it in the eyes of anyone who knows this general part of the world when I tell them where I live. The almost imperceptible raising of the eyebrow; the crumpling of the chin; the buoyant, rounded tone. The words may say “very nice too”, but the look says “pompous twat”.

Then comes the matter of connectivity. Here in Blighty, broadband is a bit of a racket. Unlike in the civilised world, we don’t enjoy the luxury of “naked” DSL so, if you’re beyond the reach of cable TV, you have to start out with a landline from BT no matter which broadband supplier you choose. So that’ll be £106.37 for the installation and then £43.11 a quarter in line rental and then tax: over the minimum twelve month term you’d pay BT £327.60 before you’ve even done anything. Whack on top the cheapest, crummiest broadband service, and you’re pushing £500 a year. I don’t really like phones (I already have personal and work mobiles and that’s two phones too many), so I’m less than enthusiastic about paying for the luxury of a landline I’d never use. So when the mobile networks finally got their act together did something useful with the 3G spectrum by offering broadband over the air, I jumped at the chance. It’s not tied to any particular location and it comes out around half the price of messing around with copper wires (mine’s a few pence over £22 a month all in, and I got the hardware thingy for free). Within the next four years or so, I’m sure the concept of broadband over cables in the road will seem comically backward for most. Maybe that’s why in the UK they’re selling 30,000 mobile broadband doodahs a week. Yeah, that’s at least 1.5 million a year. Hear that, BT? Anyway, having a broadband whatnot that works beyond the range of my home wifi means that I take it out and about. When I bought the Mac I wondered what I could ever need to stuff into its ExpressCard slot, but my mobile broadband wingding has answered this nicely. And sure enough, it follows me around just as my laptop does. But again, despite all the logic and reason, it’s another bold statement.

In an ever-increasingly image-conscious society, my appearance is of relatively little importance to me. I don’t fall for all that designer label crap and I’m never clean-shaven or particularly groomed. Clothing and the like is a practicality: providing I’m wearing something, then that’s just fine. Frankly there are many much more important things to be thinking about, so I’m usually to be found in my tatty leather jacket and whatever came to hand first out of the wardrobe that morning. Incidentally, those things in the wardrobe got there by me raiding the online sales: I’m perfectly happy with cheap-as-chips end-of-line clothing providing I have enough with which to cover myself and load the washing machine at the same time. Trouble is, that well-worn “look” swung back into “fashion”, and people go out of their way to look like they invested no effort and couldn’t care less. Bless. I look scruffy because, well, I’m genuinely scruffy, but to the onlooker it’s hard to tell those who don’t care from those who want you to think they don’t care. Once again, I’m making another unintentional lifestyle choice.

In a delicious stroke of irony, all that ration and logic that went into choosing a well-connected place to live would soon become almost completely irrelevant. To the Londoner who ended up in the provinces, the importance of road travel moved quite suddenly from zero to very high indeed. But then, in another long story, matters of health made me surrender my driving licence for a year. My house-hunting priorities didn’t cater for this particular turn of fate, and now I find myself contractually bound to possibly the worst place I could realistically have chosen to settle. Once again I find myself dependent on public transport, what little of it exists outside of the capital, and so once again I find myself sitting in stations awaiting trains, and then in trains awaiting stations. The minutes, the hours, tick by. But hey, look on the positive side: as I’m not driving, I can turn my attention to other things such as working or reading or whatever I like. Out comes the battle-weary but still terribly cute laptop and the mobile broadband gadgetry, and I’m hooked back into this wonderful pretend world where I can make all of this look intentional. Just then, I look up, and I see myself. At least ten times over. I’m looking around a waiting room, or across the pseudo-outdoor seating area of a station cafe, or down the carriage of a Pendolino, and there I am over and over again.

Row after row after row of scruffy-looking, Mac-wielding, twenty-something white males; all of us publicly Googling and/or Twittering on our way back to our pathetic middle-class beige shangri-las after another day’s thinking-outside-the-box in some funky modern technology-centric industry; all half-resenting, half-delighting at the constant interruptions via our BlackBerrys from others elsewhere who have something terrifically important to bring to our attention; all trying to stifle our accents for fear of revealing our private education; and all suddenly seeing ourselves all around and trying to play it down.

I could try to insist that none of this is a “lifestyle choice”, but you’d never believe me. I’m starting to wonder if I believe it myself. Maybe it is all intentional. As it turns out, there’s a million of us just like me; who cuss like me; who just don’t give a fuck like me; who dress like me; walk, talk and act like me… blah, blah, and so on. In fact, yeah, bugger it, it’s a lifestyle choice. I’ve made a series of practical choices about certain aspects of my life, and this is the net result. No doubt all these other people have done exactly the same. Unless of course they’re trying to be like this… but, as an onlooker, I’d never know.