Xmas In A Box : Lost in A Maze of Alien Technology

Passing a long-dead red telephone box this morning, I realised it was now in use as a pop-up library. I've found several in recent years. It happens when friendly bookworms identify a public place where spare books can be left, taken and read by likeminded souls. And lucky readers tend to leave replacements of their own. During the first Covid lockdown one great example flowered on a bench at the front gates of Alexandra Park in Glasgow. The Coop supermarket on the island of Bute has another. But the phone-box library sums up the one great problem of the 21st century: life in boxes. 

Part of the fascination of the extinct British telephone boxes is the memories they evoke in those of us old enough to remember them as curious but very functional public spaces. We learned how they worked, consulted the directories they contained, made calls from those which hadn't been vandalised  and from time to time pursued a whole rangee of other purposes, many of them sordid. There were so many great phoneless reasons to enter the sturdy red box; sheltering from rain and cold, hiding from pursuit, stealing the change from the cash-box, drug-dealing, sexual gratification etc.

All too soon, however, phones came in off the street. In 1966, the arrival in my home of a telphone set -the first I ever saw- filled me with worry and doubt. I had a very powerful, and as it turned out, well-founded suspicion that this instrument would change our lives forever.  Until that fateful day, information from beyond my circle of family and (school) friends had come only from newspapers, radio and -as of 1964- the television. Nevertheless, I experienced these media as portals to otherness -places and people detatched from my own reality. For me, the events of the headlines took place in a parallel culture, no more real than stories in the hundreds of books on our shelves.

The telephone, on the other hand, was not -I quickly learned- some passive box you could switch off. It had a voice of its own which burst into harsh song at moments of its own choosing, could interrupt any activity -and worst of all, could more or less force you into an entirely different frame of mind, because everything that came down the telephone was personal. I repeatedly saw my mother or father recieve a call (no one phoned us kids)  after which their mood would be altered completely. Our guttersnipe  community had an insatiable appetite for spreading and receiving gossip and bad news.

I saw less and less of my mother, by day or night, as the telephone occupied more and more of her time. Fuelled by one or more interminable conversations, she would scurry out to relay her discoveries in person to neighbouring women not yet in the telephone club. But most troubling, to me, was the dawning realisation that anyone with our phone number could barge into our tranquility at will, shatter a mood, ruin a game or a conversation or a book. Would we ever relax again?   

In 2022 I see the answer to that question everyday on every street, every public or private space, in the legions of smartphone junkies hunched over their plastic comforters, prodding and probing to release the seratonin fairies trapped within. 

Doc's In A Box

By the same token, a very similar feature of Ancient Britain -the royal blue police telephone-box- is forever branded in our minds as the Tardis - that cunningly disguised space and time-travel machine belonging to Doctor Who. TV viewers will remember that its familiar, seemingly innocent exterior disguised a vast sci-fi interior of astonishing futuristic complexity. The Tardis is, I confess, on my mind, as this week I'm in charge -barely- of an equally extraordinary building, courtesy of a family of wealthy millennials who are Xmasing on the other side of the planet earth.       

This house is not, alas, a machine designed to travel at will through the space/time continuum, but is, in its way, just as amazing. On arrival you see a very old two-storey thatched cottage, and step through the creaking wooden door into a low-ceilinged front room of oak and stone,with an 18th century brick-framed bread-oven set in the wall. Then you turn left through a doorway into a huge, brightly-lit box resembling the kitchen/diner in the Starship Nostromo just before the alien bursts out of John Hurt's belly to scream at the sky because Donald Trump was elected President. (Possible space/time confusion here). 

The house you have entered appears on the outside to be an aged, humble English peasant-dwelling of the kind that sells for about three quarters of a million in these days of white flight. Inside, however, it expands in a manner only a Time-Lord could imagine, down neon-lit corridors, past banks of targeted-light controls and enough concealed storage drawers and cupboards to pack away all the amplification equipment necessary for a Rolling Stones stadium gig, plus Keith Richards' guitar collection. 

 

Tiptoeing into this alternative universe, you are soon confronted by the first of several gigantic refrigerator-freezers. It has four doors, one of which is in fact a touch-screen laptop, offering rolling news and/or recipe hints from the its always-live internet feed. Visualising a bottle of San Miguel, instead I am suddenly looking at a deliriously happy Asian woman under the title Japanese Ramen Noodle Soup. Why you would desire that while fetching a beer beats me. Is the fridge attempting to train me away from beer to noodles? 

Unimpressed by this Colossus of Cold, I smiled fondly, thinking of the fridge I carried upstairs to our first-floor rental flat a few months ago. Twenty years old, it stands all of 42 inches tall and cost £30 from the shorefront charity shop. Strangely enough, it chills lager every bit as well as this  monster, and will allow me to get giggling drunk without a single reference to oriental cuisine..

KITCHEN CULTURE

As a heavily addicted cook, the Tardis kitchen beckoned me. It is, of course, a polished, shiny arena that stretches away from you like a magazine advert for restaurant equipment. It boasts a kitchen-island so large you would need gorilla-scale arms to reach across it for the solar-powered pepper-grinder. A space-age ground-coffee dispenser and three multi-purpose ovens are set into blank, softly gleaming walls. About 100 square feet of blank, handle-less cupboards surround you, with no clue as to their contents. Blank is the word.

In one corner stands the multi-talented supertap that will spurt water boiled, cooled or iced at the touch of a button, instantly. There's also a mystery machine -about three cubic feet of titanium-hard plastic- studded with vents, slots and switches I will never dare touch, no matter what promises it makes. Long, wide slabs of chrome and marble trigger brutal fantasies of industrial-scale chopping and slicing. You could dismember a bull in here -and perhaps the inhabitants do. There's ample space in the freezers.    

Towards the rear of the kitchen the lies a dazzling array of walls and tables of thick glass. Instead of the Bladerunner retro-chic light-switches in the corridors, here be black, mysterious digital panels suggesting exra-terrestrial intelligence. These can, when stroked by a human fingertip, arrange every possible combination of up, down and side-light -except the one you actually want. A powerful air-extractor unit is positioned above the induction cooker, its razor-sharp, steel edges at the ideal height to split your skull as you lean forward to peer into your frying pan (barely visible in the muted neon lighting you settled for after fumbling in vain with the alien panels).

SMARTBOGS

There is a sparsely finished living-room where about ten yards of sofas centre on an enormous screen. As someone who has not possessed a television for over a decade, the spectacle of one seven feet wide and four tall was a bit overwhelming. I dabbled with a few minutes of channel-hopping, but felt more than a little intimidated by the endless parade of smiling strong empowered women, Africans running hi-tech industries, effeminate men mincing for no apparent reason, and mixed-race couples binge-eating fast-food with their attractive children. As all these happy faces were five feet wide with teeth three inches long, I felt somewhat  intimidated. Perhaps I tuned into American TV by mistake. 

Roaming the various staircases that wind between lavatories, bathrooms and bedrooms with no perceptible logic, I became aware of a low-fi background rumble that reinforces the sense of having boarded a spaceship already in motion. Beepers beep and engines groan; motion-sensored lights blink and lurk in sullen, pastel blobs. You hear regular swooshes of oil being injected into the impressive variety of hi-tech slab-metal radiators -a 24/7 process that must be eating half the energy output of Germany. Or wherever we get that stuff these days.      

Downstairs you happen upon a dark, brooding bathroom apparently designed for a cold-blooded creature with limited manual dexterity that showers lying down. An alligator/human hybrid? In here, as you lower your behind onto the toilet seat, a loud beep triggers a whoosh-hum, as a loo-centric extractor fan kicks in. While this fanfare settles into a hypnotic throb, you realise the seat is heated. Which is very nice indeed on a snowy December morning. My subconscious notes that the two designer taps on the sink to my right could easily be manipulated by a claw or tentacle. In a cubicle to the left I see a six-foot bench above which a grill in the ceiling will -if commanded- rain customised water on the seated operator. A touch-screen on the wall awaits orders.

 

There's a remote control in a slot on the wall next the loo, too, but I don't want to know what it does. It's fine to just sit here warming my buttocks, postponing any further exploration of this peculiar abandoned spacecraft. I reflect that I was five years old -FIVE!- when an inside toilet was first installed in my childhood home. Until then we had to use an outside loo at the foot of the tenement stairs, shared with three other familes and random drunk men. We were thrilled to have a toilet of our own, even if it didn't have buttons marked Power, Seat; Water and Energy Saver embossed on it.

The world of smartbogs, we see, is life in a very different box. Although unfamiliar gadgets are everywhere,  certain familiar comforts are strangely absent. There are few interior doors on board this ship, and absolutely no curtains at any window. Not a small matter. As a result, the night brings writhing, kaleidescopic tree-shadows -projected onto the bedroom ceiling by the motion-activated amber lights which have been dotted around the grounds. Any passing rat or rabbit can trigger a display that shatters your dreams, all night long. Why is it so? 

If I rise in the dark to visit the loo -which I oftimes do- it's vital to turn sharp left in the windowless unlit corridor beyond the doorway. One step to the right and you would plunge down an atrociously steep bannister-free staircase to certain doom. But this hazard is completely invisible in the existential hell of four in the morning. Remember, you've already been jerked awake by Bright Eyes and his chums every fifteen minutes for the last six hours since whisky and Lem-sip carried you to merciful oblivion. Tread carefully, starman. 

Note to self: On the return trip, keep right, for god's sake.

BOXING CLEVER

Day dawns but nothing can be taken for granted. Simple, everyday tasks can be completely subverted, we learn, in the hands of modern design professionals. For almost two days we wrestled with the big handle-less cupboards and drawers which opened in response to a push, but were seemingly impossible to close. Two inches from closure they simply bounced back; no amount of force could persuade them to shut. 

By accident, we discovered the secret: you must give the open drawer a gentle, firm nudge forward, with a very precise amount of vim. Treated with sufficient respect, it will glide seamlessly into place, mocking your former ignorance. Ideal, I guess, if you normally open and close drawers with a paw, or your fingerless stump. I bet the whole concept looked like a brilliant idea on some fuckwit's iPad, after a pint or two of cafe latte. 

Perhaps its the combination of winter, decrepitude and the stress of our fifth consecutive week on the road, but I'm struggling to deal with what is clearly many young people's idea of unbridled luxury. I've never been in a kitchen -let alone such a big one- without a single shelf on view. It's like cooking in a massive walk-in cupboard made of huge, upright chessboards. Everything's black or white. The floor tiles, furniture and fittings are all square edged, cubic, circular, rigid, as if an acute arc or random pattern were an offense to nature. Perhaps it is -in polite society on Alpha Centauri. 

Yet humans really do live here. Several walls feature very large, framed photographs of the family itself. In every picture, adults and children alike are captured in perpetual smile-mode, often floating in that  featureless white space that hack photographers call 'the infinity cove'. The house. too, is a kind of infinity cove -a hermetically-sealed retreat from the harsh reality of the irregular outside world; a pattern-free, regulated space where infinite varieties of IT and L.E.D.s can communicate and plan WW3 without troubling the organic inhabitants.

Every space is so photogenic I get the uncomfortable feeling we must be being videotaped by hidden cameras. There are a dozen plus digital/plastic/chrome what-nots in every room that could contain lenses and microphones. Hell, you could could conceal a life-size robot film crew in here. Isn't there some theory that the real humans died out decades ago and we are all just avatars in some bizarre computer simulation? Wouldn't that explain everything that's happening?

Such will be life in tomorrow's world, I suppose. Already I am starting to question the veracity of the tranquil rural scene outside. Perhaps the whole village is an illusion, and this entire street of thatched cottages is a facade. Maybe every front door opens on an entirely different hidden facility; sunken palaces, bio-labs, pulsing computer-banks, internet servers, underground nuke-proof caverns, ballroom-size amusement-centres and bespoke franchises like Ocado and Toto.

One thing's for sure though. Three more weeks indoors and I'll be found gibbering in tongues, crouched in a foetal position on the heated toilet-seat, wearing an alligator-mask with an electric toothbrush clenched between my savage reptile teeth. New Year resolution for 2023: I am really going to have to get out more.  

Ian Andrew-Patrick

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