I was thinking about mobile phones this week, which probably means I need to get out more, but there was a reason for it. We’re all familiar, probably far too familiar, with the NHS Covid 19 app which is allegedly designed to identify people near you who might be carrying the virus so that you can, presumably, run away and hide from them. Its more practical purpose is to allow you to scan a QR code to get inside a café or other facility without having to write out your name, postcode and telephone number on a bit of paper, which does get a bit tedious, not to mention irritating.
The problem I had was that my quite expensive 2-year-old mobile refused to run the app. I could download it and install it, but every time I ran it, it crashed immediately. It might be germane to ask why the NHS techies were apparently incapable of designing such a vitally important app and making sure that it would work on any mobile, irrespective of the flavour of Android it was running. But realistically, with the general level of ineptitude exhibited by most branches of our government during this pandemic, I doubt that such an enquiry would produce a coherent answer. So I gave up trying and bought another, much cheaper, mobile that does run the app.
And that reminded me, in a roundabout kind of way, of something that happened a few years ago.
Back in February 2011 my literary agent came up with an idea. He wanted me to write a novel about the loss of the RMS Titanic back in 1912, but with a different ending. OK so far. Then he broke it to me, and none too gently, that he wanted the book to be ready to offer to a publisher at the London Book Fair in April that year. Although the Titanic‘s anniversary was the following year, publishing a new book takes months to complete so we needed to get it written and sold as soon as possible. Because my default position as an author is to say ‘yes’ whenever anyone offers me a writing gig, I agreed.
The timing necessitated me writing just under 100,000 words in a month, which you don’t need to be a mathematical genius to realise works out at over 3,000 words a day, every day. So I was starting at about nine in the morning, and usually stopping at about ten or eleven at night. To complicate things, the project also required a lot of research because for some reason anything to do with the Titanic seems to attract a vast flock of anoraks who appear to know the entire layout of the ship and will complain long and bitterly, and in writing, if you get the location of the First Class Purser’s Office – or anything else – wrong , which obviously slowed down my output. While this was going on, I simply didn’t have the leisure to write anything else, or even do much else.
At that time I lived for most of the year in Andorra in the Pyrenees, in a small house loosely attached to the side of a mountain, and early in February we were blessed with not one but two water leaks. Luckily, our tame – or at least house-trained – builder was already working in the house down in the garage, and immediately swung into action to try to find them. He deduced that water was coming down the underside of the internal staircase, which was made of concrete, and set about the lowest step with a jackhammer. Examination of the hole he’d dug suggested the leak was coming from further up, so he then attacked the second step. It will probably come as no particular surprise to learn that the leak was actually under the top step, which he discovered when every other step in the staircase had had a large channel carved out of its middle. This assault on our property sound much like the outbreak of a war, with the machine gun-like hammering of the jackhammer, and was doing nothing at all for my concentration as I attempted to get some work done.
We had another house in France, and after about five hours of this, we decided that it would be a really, really good idea if we just slung the dog in the back of the car and headed north, leaving the builder to fix the leak, which he’d now found, and then let him return the staircase to a structure that we would no longer need crampons and ice axes to climb up or down.
So we went to France. Our house there was in a mediaeval village in the southern Dordogne. In fact, it was a good conversation stopper to say that we bought Credit Agricol, but it was actually true, although only a building which they had just vacated. The communication problem referred to in the title of this post was, not to put too fine a point on it, France Telecom. If you think BT is bad, and it undeniably is, France Telecom is in a league of its own. In 2010, our then next door neighbour sold his house and bought another one at the end of the same street, a distance of about ninety yards away. Both houses had telephone lines physically installed, and all he wanted to do was move his phone number from his previous house and transfer it to the new property.
This, you might expect, would involve throwing some kind of electronic switch in an exchange somewhere, an operation that might take perhaps two or three seconds. Even allowing for the inevitable form filling, head scratching and other activities inseparable from work of this kind, you might think a week would be adequate. In fact, it took France Telecom just over two months to complete this simple operation and, to add a typically French insult to injury, for the second month they rang my neighbour on a regular basis, but always, significantly, on his mobile phone, to ask if the landline was functioning correctly. His replies became noticeably shorter and increasingly lacking in warmth towards the end of this period.
The bank which we had purchased was well supplied with landlines. There were phone points in virtually every room, and multiple lines entering the building. When we enquired informally about the possibility of having just one of these existing lines connected to a telephone handset inside the building and to the local exchange outside, there was a certain amount of sucking of teeth and even more head scratching, and eventually a timescale of six to eight months was suggested as being reasonable. It may have seemed reasonable to France Telecom, but it didn’t strike us that way. So we ditched that idea and bought a mobile.
Luckily, our new neighbour was quite happy to let us use his wireless internet connection while I was writing the book, which was a life-saver, even though I had to go into one of the bedrooms and stand in one spot right next to the solid stone party wall to get even a half-way reasonable download speed.
But it all worked. My agent was pleased, and Simon & Schuster bought The Titanic Secret as part of a two-book deal at the London Book Fair, so I was happy as well.
What it did point up, though, was the vital importance of being connected, and how difficult it is to do any kind of research if you don’t have a good connection to the internet. It also proved, at least to me, that jackhammers and writing don’t mix.
Next time, I’ll try and think of something interesting to say about being an author, rather than about builders and the French phone service non-providers.
