Читать книгу Dad You Suck: And other things my children tell me - Tim Dowling - Страница 8

Did I teach my children to use the internet? I certainly don’t remember offering any lessons or demonstrations. I first got online at some point in 1997, before two of my three sons were even born. My recollection of the web in those days is of a half-finished cyber-suburb, a construction site giving on to vast fields. There wasn’t much to do, and there was hardly anyone around. And it was slow. For a long time, sending emails just seemed like a less reliable form of faxing.

In the early days I stood over my children when they used the internet, not because it was a threatening new environment, but because it was expensive. One thought twice before going online to seek information; it wasn’t even that likely you’d find it, and it might turn out to be quicker and cheaper to drive to the library and ask someone. The internet was, first and foremost, a test of one’s patience.

My children were eerily patient with it, which is why my supervision eventually became patchy. A six-year-old will wait all day for some stupid online game to load. I won’t. The first hard evidence that my children were using my computer without my knowledge came from the computer itself.

You’ll know what I mean by it, even though I had to look up the correct term: saved form data. It refers to those words and phrases you type into little boxes on your computer, which your computer then stores so it can helpfully offer them up as suggestions in the future. So, for example, whenever you type a ‘T’ into Google, you might be greeted with this list:

technical term remembering box suggest type in Google

Tim Dowling

Tim Dowling smug

Tim Dowling twat

That’s what I get, anyway. None of us, I suspect, would care to be judged by his saved form data – I’m embarrassed for myself on a regular basis – but occasionally I am greeted by search terms I know I have never typed. Once, for instance, I typed a ‘Y’ into Google and was greeted with ‘YouTube 10 most funneist goals’. It’s a typical example of a clutch of unfamiliar search terms one might file under Poor Spelling Fails To Yield Desired Results, along with ‘1000 beast footballgames’ and ‘stange insturments’.

When my children were small they were permitted to use my work computer under circumstances that numbered precisely zero, but I knew that if they wished to access the internet when they were supposed to be asleep, my office was easy to get to without being detected.

The discovery of this unfamiliar saved form data prompted me to sift through the search terms left on both computers – mine and my wife’s – to see if I could gain any insight into my children’s internet habits. If this sounds like spying, let me say in my defence that I was really bored that day. I went through the whole alphabet.

Most of the searches were more or less what you would expect: ‘fantasy football’; ‘hamster in a blender’. Some were mildly mysterious. The cryptic phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’ seemed to me to be one child complaining to another – typing it out softly, so as not to wake anyone – that a website he’d been woken up to view was proving insufficiently diverting.

Then I got to ‘m’ and up popped ‘my Dad is an island’. For a long moment I forgot to breathe in. I am familiar with virtually every sentence on the internet that features both my name and the word twat, but nothing I’ve seen chilled me as much as ‘my Dad is an island’. What did it mean?

I tried to imagine one of my sons sneaking up to the computer in the middle of the night to tap ‘my Dad is an island’ into Google. Why would a child do that? It makes no sense, I thought. And then I thought: it makes no sense to you, because you are an island.

Google was no help. I got no meaningful results for ‘my Dad is an island’. The sentence did not exist anywhere on the World Wide Web. I couldn’t stop thinking of my youngest son, the most likely suspect, trying to phrase his tearful query without using the word ‘aloof’, which he doesn’t know, or ‘unreachable’, which he can’t spell. ‘My Dad,’ he writes, alone in the dark, ‘is an island.’ There are zero results.

When he gets home from school the next day, I ask him to come with me. His oldest brother, intrigued by my artificially breezy tone, follows us. On the way upstairs I explain about saved form data, and by way of a warm-up I type a ‘b’ in the box. Up pops the phrase ‘brought me out of bed for this shrit’.

‘What does this mean?’ I ask.

He looks a bit sheepish. ‘You know they have those shirts that say, “You got me out of bed for this?” I just really wanted one.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Well, what about this?’ I press ‘m’.

He peers at the sentence ‘my Dad is an island’ and starts laughing. ‘What the hell!’ he says. ‘I didn’t write that.’

‘That was me,’ says his brother. ‘I was looking for a book of poems we read in primary school. For Mum to put it in her bookshop.’

‘But you get zero results,’ I say.

‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s actually called Daddy Island.’

Over time my children and the various machines in my life came to control and manipulate me in much the same way. The children realize I do not fully understand the machines. The machines seem to know that I do not fully understand the children. The children and the machines take it in turns to misbehave wilfully at critical times. Occasionally, when I send a child’s phone thirteen unanswered ‘where r u??’ texts, only to receive the cryptic reply ‘wots good cuz’ four hours later, I feel they are acting in concert.

I am spending a long, lazy afternoon trying to print something for my wife. The printer, which has not worked properly for some time, refuses to spit out anything legible. I clean the printhead, put in new ink cartridges, clean the printhead again, deep clean the printhead, and manually realign the printhead, printing a new copy between each step, but they all come out the same: ridged, smudged, squashed.

Frustrated, I give up and go downstairs, where I am ineluctably drawn to the television. There isn’t anything on. My wife walks into the room and sits down.

‘Busy day?’ she says.

‘I just wanted to check the tennis,’ I say. ‘But there isn’t any tennis yet.’

‘Did you print out the thing I sent you?’ she says.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I tried, but I couldn’t.’

We watch the Queen arriving at Wimbledon for the first time since 1977. My wife is weirdly excited by this, while I am unaccountably pissed off on Wimbledon’s behalf.

‘I love the Queen,’ my wife says.

‘I’d be like, oh, thanks for turning up,’ I say. ‘How did we manage without you for the last thirty-odd years.’

‘Leave her alone,’ my wife says. The screen freezes, with the Queen wearing a fixed grin that cannot hide her contempt for tennis. I push the remote and the screen goes blue. Nothing I own works.

‘Arghh!’ says my wife. ‘Fix it!’

‘I can’t,’ I say. ‘We need a child.’

That afternoon I go to pick up the oldest one, wondering how many questions I should ask about his school trip before I raise the subject of the blank blue screen. As I drive, my phone pings and buzzes continually in my pocket, ten, fifteen, twenty times. Finally I pull over. It transpires that the phone is logged into the middle one’s Facebook account and that I am receiving a stream of comments about a photo from the whole of Year 7. All the machines in my life are working against me, I think, or in the service of others. This eventuality was probably predicted by somebody. I should have read more science fiction.

The next day is bright and sunny, the hottest of the year so far.

‘What are we going to do today?’ my wife asks.

‘I’m going to buy a new printer.’

‘I wish you’d buy me a printer,’ she says.

‘I’m going to get a printer for both of us,’ I say. ‘A wireless printer that will print everything from everywhere.’

‘Really?’

‘I think so.’

The printer I end up buying is black and twice the size of the old one. It looks like Darth Vader’s head. I carry it up to my office, where I spend a sweltering half-hour crawling around under my desk with wires. The configuration process is meant to be straightforward, but it’s not, and I have to back up and start again a few times. Then I go downstairs and repeat the process on my wife’s computer, which is a different make and requires a different installation procedure.

Finally, with the afternoon gone, I find a picture of the dog on my wife’s computer and press Print. Nothing seems to happen, but when I go up to my office a picture of the dog is waiting in the printer tray, richly coloured and exquisitely detailed. It’s a miracle.

‘Look,’ I say, showing it to the oldest one.

‘Did you just print that?’ he says.

‘I printed it,’ I say, ‘from downstairs.’

‘Whoa,’ he says.

The next day, I’m at my desk looking up the word ‘ineluctably’ to make sure I don’t really mean ‘inexorably’, when the printer beeps and grinds into life. Oh my God, I think. What have I done? I didn’t even touch anything! I watch as it sucks a sheet of paper into its belly and judders with such force that it rocks the spindly little table I’ve set it on.

The piece of paper slides out and lands on the floor. I pick it up. It says, ‘HI DAD’ on it. It knows me, I think. It knows it’s mine.

Late at night I creep up to my office to check my email before bed. I should know by now that emails of promise rarely hit one’s inbox after 11 p.m., but one can dream.

While trying to delete some fresh junk mail I hit an unknown combination of keys with a fat thumb and the computer starts to read its screen to me.

‘Subject – mega deal on drill bits and power files,’ it says, in a loud robot voice.

‘Sorry?’ I say.

‘Reply to no reply at tool shop direct dot co dot UK.’

‘Shut up,’ I say, clicking the mouse repeatedly. I try to turn down the volume, but pressing the mute key only makes the screen scroll upwards.

‘So now you’ve changed what the buttons mean?’ I say.

‘Please read,’ it says. ‘A personal appeal from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.’

‘Oh my God,’ I say, kneading the keyboard with my fists. ‘Are you planning to say the entire internet?’ It ignores me and carries on. I go to bed, shutting my office door tightly behind me.

The next morning the computer is still talking. I try to ignore it and get down to work, but the voice starts saying every letter I type. When I hit the space bar, it says, ‘Space’. After an hour of this, I do what I have to do.

‘Help!’ I scream.

‘What do you want?’ says the oldest one, who is drifting past the door in his pyjamas, laptop open under his chin.

‘Please consider the environment before printing this email,’ says the computer.

‘I can’t live like this,’ I say. ‘Make it stop.’

‘Command F5,’ says the boy, somehow managing to roll his eyes without peeling them from the screen.

‘Voiceover off,’ says the computer.

‘Thank you,’ I say. ‘That was really beginning to …’ The boy is already gone.

A morning like any other: I go up to my computer and jab the space bar to make it come to life. Only it doesn’t. I wait a while, trying to determine how much unsaved work lies beyond the black screen. Eventually impatience overrides caution and I turn the computer off and then back on again. Except it doesn’t come back on.

I breathe in slowly. I tell myself it’s too early to panic over the possibility of catastrophe. I only really care about one thing on my present computer, the aforementioned unsaved work. For the sake of argument, let’s call it a nearly completed book. I do sort of need that. I turn the computer off and on again, but there is not much difference between the two.

I’m not an idiot. I email the updated document to myself at intervals precisely in case this sort of thing happens. My priority is to find the most recent version and secure it on another computer.

Except that the most recent email for some reason contains only the first quarter of the document. The newest complete version in my inbox is months old. It turns out I am an idiot after all. Now, I tell myself quietly, you may panic.

I shriek for the middle one, forcing him from his bed. He comes downstairs, stares into space as I carefully explain the situation so far, taps the space bar, clicks the mouse, and tries a few odd keystroke combinations.

‘Dunno,’ he says finally.

‘What?’ I say.

Three days and a dozen helpline calls later, no one in my family is speaking to me. My throat is sore from shouting. My knee and left fist hurt from hours spent pounding one with the other. My children have seen a side of me I have never wanted to show them: panicked, irrational, brimming over with uncontrolled fury. They’ve seen it before, to be fair; just not this many days in a row.

My hard drive is in the possession of a man in Wandsworth who isn’t returning my calls, possibly because of the tone of my voice in all the messages I keep leaving. My wife rings from the M3, her idea of a safe distance.

‘Any luck?’ she asks.

‘No,’ I say, trying out a new tone of giddy resignation. ‘My life is ruined, but whatever. That’s cool.’

‘Gotta go,’ my wife says.

‘Me, too,’ I say. ‘I have another call.’

It’s Darren from Data Solutions, ringing to let me know that my hard drive is unreadable, and quite possibly blank.

‘OK, Darren,’ I say. ‘That’s cool.’

I hang up and start searching through all my inboxes and outboxes again, trying different keywords. A draft email I’ve never seen before suddenly pops up: a complete, unsent version of the document from five days before.

‘I found you,’ I say. Unfortunately I can’t think of anyone to ring who would, at this point, be pleased for me. Not even Darren.

A week later, I walk into the kitchen to find the oldest one striding back and forth, phone to ear, panting in quiet fury. His bank card has been stolen, thieves have exceeded his overdraft and he’s been cut off mid-call, twice.

‘Yes, I’m still here,’ he says. ‘I already … yes, it … wait … can you hear me now?’ He stalks out of the room in search of better reception.

‘Remind you of anyone?’ my wife says.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I say.

There is a bloodcurdling scream from next door and the oldest returns, his face dark purple.

‘Holy fucking shitting God!’ he shouts, lifting the phone high over his head. His behaviour is, I must admit, eerily familiar, particularly the way he adjusts his run-up to ensure that, when he finally hurls the phone, it lands softly on the sofa. Then he stomps back out.

‘Attractive, isn’t it?’ my wife says.

I don’t answer, because secretly the boy’s response strikes me as wholly proportionate. I mean, what else are you supposed to do?

A fortnight later the middle one walks into my office, iPad to nose, to turn the wireless router on and off. He finds me looking intently at a leaflet titled ‘About Your Recovery’.

‘From alcohol?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘From data loss.’

‘Oh,’ he says.

‘What do you mean, “from alcohol?”’ I say.

The boy shrugs and walks off, pausing only to scrutinize the blinking light on the front of the router on his way out of the door.

In the weeks since I lost all my data, my computer’s dead hard drive has been on a journey. It’s now in a clean room in Surrey, where people in hairnets and disposable overshoes are awaiting a decision from me. Along with my leaflet, I’ve received a two-page report estimating the likely percentage of my data that can be recovered: most, if not all, but possibly none. The enormous cost, on the other hand, is not an estimate; nor is it refundable, nor does it include VAT.

My computer has been on a different journey. For an incredibly modest price, it has been fitted with a one-terabyte hard drive and returned to me, blank as new. A certain amount of data has migrated back: 12,000 old emails pinged into my inbox, and all my music purchases reappeared. But otherwise it’s empty. When I turn on my computer in the morning, I feel strangely unencumbered, and correspondingly susceptible to notions of promise. I begin to think that my old data should stay lost.

My wife, meanwhile, is trying to convince me that recovery is something I should seriously consider, whatever the cost.

‘We’re still talking about my hard drive, right?’ I say, jamming an empty wine bottle nose-first into the recycling bin.

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘What about all your old documents, things you’ve written?’

‘Don’t need it,’ I say. ‘Chances are I’d never look at it again anyway.’

‘It’s a legitimate business expense,’ she says, knowing how favourably disposed I am towards language that makes me sound like a businessman.

‘Who cares?’ I say. ‘I’m free!’

Some days later, at an event in Sussex, a strange woman starts showing me pictures of her dog on her phone.

‘I have dogs,’ I say, whipping out my own phone in retaliation. As I scroll through to find the most charmingly composed picture of the pair, four years’ worth of memories flash before my eyes: red-eyed holiday snaps; accidental shots of the kitchen door; a blurry, vertiginous pap of Phil Tufnell taken by one of my children; photos of Halloween costumes, snake eggs, a snowman wearing 3D glasses, my new ladder, a patch of lawn ringed by the shoes of fellow party guests … Suddenly all this stuff – this digital information on which so many fragile memories are pinned, and which exists nowhere but on my old, cracked-screen phone – seems terribly important to me. My data is my memory, and I am as anchored as I am imprisoned by it.

A week later I receive in the post a black box no bigger than a cigarette packet: the contents of my old hard drive. I plug it into my computer and have a look. As far as I can tell, everything is there: half-finished articles, old invoices, a jpeg of a Mondeo starter motor, the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits. It would be the work of seconds to transfer the lot to my new, giant hard drive. In the end, I decide to keep it all on the black box, in case I one day feel the need to chuck it into a canal.

Lessons in primatology 1

Over the course of a decade of writing about family life, I have from time to time experienced what military strategists might call blowback. It can be subtle: a slight but perceptible decline in my wife’s amusement at being portrayed as a harridan in the national press. One of my children may object to having his words reported in a way that he believes misrepresents him somehow, even after he’s spent the fiver.

Obviously I regret causing offence or embarrassment – it’s not my primary motivation – but on those occasions when I accidentally overstep the mark, a larger problem presents itself: next week’s deadline. Having pissed my family off this Saturday, how do I write about them the following one? On those difficult occasions I simply opt for a temporary blurring of identities, a minor precaution which protects the sensibilities of all concerned, and rarely undermines the essential truth of what has transpired.

So, for example, my life partner – let’s call him Sean – might arrive home of an evening with our three adopted ex-research chimps. It’s Friday, we’re both tired, and there is no food in the house.

‘One of us,’ Sean says glumly, ‘is going to have to go to Sainsbury’s.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I say sweetly, ‘I’ll go.’

‘Oh,’ Sean says, ‘I didn’t expect that.’

Sean has failed to remember that today is our gay-wedding anniversary, and I have not reminded him. Sean is normally good on dates, because he writes things down, but for some reason he is never able to remember our anniversary. I think he resents the obligation to commemorate a day we both found fairly traumatic. Some years I also forget, but this morning my eye snagged on the date in the newspaper, and I knew it had some significance.

All day I have been plotting how best to take advantage of this. At first I toyed with the idea of organizing some kind of surprise evening out, until I realized that anything that elaborate might make Sean feel terrible, when I wanted him to feel only mildly derelict. I thought of going out to buy some monstrously expensive present, but Sean is difficult to buy for, possessing both particular tastes and a charming inability to hide his disgust. In any case, I spent all afternoon googling myself and missed the shops.

A trip to the supermarket suddenly seemed the perfect answer – a card, some cheap flowers and a bottle of champagne – just enough to say that I care, more than you.

As I unpack the shopping, Sean catches me in the kitchen.

‘What are you doing behind there?’ he says. ‘What are you hiding?’

‘Nothing.’

‘What is that? You bought flowers?’

‘Yes,’ I say, holding them up. ‘But then I thought you might think they were hideous.’

‘No, those are nice,’ he says. ‘I like them, thank you.’

As he takes them from me and goes off in search of a vase, I realize this might be the time to come clean, but I find I am not man enough to relinquish the upper hand. I go upstairs and puzzle over what to write in the card. I want something simple and not overly romantic, maybe something amusing like ‘To a very civil partner’. In the end I just write ‘It’s OK that you forgot’, and stuff it in an envelope marked ‘Sean’.

A little later, Sean comes in while I am cooking. ‘What’s this?’ he says, picking up the envelope. As he opens it I retrieve the bottle of champagne from the freezer.

‘Uh-oh,’ he says. ‘I forgot.’

‘I knew you would,’ I say, kissing him gently on the cheek. ‘You always do.’

‘You came in with flowers, and still I didn’t get it,’ he says. ‘That’s really bad.’ Our youngest chimp, Kurt, waddles into the room and makes the sign for ‘hungry’.

‘Dad fooled me,’ Sean tells him. ‘It was our anniversary, and I forgot.’

‘Again,’ I say. Kurt makes the sign for ‘whatever’, helps himself to a banana and leaves. I pour the champagne.

‘I notice you got only a half-bottle,’ Sean says.

‘I know you don’t really like it,’ I say. ‘It seemed a waste.’ Our middle chimp, Anton, comes in and signs, ‘Can I have some of that?’

‘You can have a sip of mine,’ Sean says. ‘I don’t really like it.’

‘Just a sip,’ I say. I worry about giving Anton alcohol, because he’s only ten and he can lift a car.