Letters to the Editor

Every evening at seven it starts. Bang. Bang. Bang. And then that laughter, as if somebody had won something.

We used to play tennis, a sport with dignity and white clothing. Now they build glass halls on every industrial estate, and grown adults pay to hit a ball against a wall.

I am only asking: who will look after all these halls when the craze is over? And who is thinking of the knees?

I have three grandchildren and all three have a phone. Yet none of them ever rings. They send little pictures of yellow faces and write “ok” without a capital letter.

When I was young, we rang. We stood in the hall with the cord wound round a finger and talked until Father shouted that it cost money.

What becomes of a people who stop talking to each other? I fear we shall have a generation that cannot say “hello” without first sending a message to say they are about to.

My daughter got top marks for an essay on Strindberg. She has never read Strindberg. She “asked the AI”.

I had to learn to write by hand, with ink that smudged. It was painful and good for me. Now the machine writes, the teacher marks it with another machine, and no human being has been involved at all.

Soon nobody will know how to put a sentence together. And then who will write letters to the editor?

Wherever you go you see them: young people carrying gigantic mugs as though they were life rings. There is water in them. Ordinary water.

We drank water from the tap, from our hands or from the garden hose, and we lived. Now water must have a straw, a handle and a colour called “sage”.

I am not worried about hydration. I am worried about a generation that cannot be thirsty for ten minutes.

Yesterday I had to step into the road three times to get past e-scooters that someone had left in the middle of the way. One was in a bush. One stood in a fountain.

Nobody owns them, nobody puts them away and nobody seems to know where they are going. They are like pigeons, but with batteries.

I propose that the council introduce a pound for stray scooters, just as there was once a pound for loose horses.

I sat on the bus for half an hour and counted. Of twenty-two passengers, twenty were looking down at a phone. The twenty-first was asleep. The twenty-second was me.

We used to look out of the window. We saw the seasons, the cows and the neighbour’s new car. Now people know the weather in New York but not that it is raining on them.

I do not wish to be old and grumpy. But I want somebody to see the cows.

My son listens to everything at double speed. Books, lectures, even his girlfriend’s voice messages. He says he is “saving time”.

What will he do with all the time he saves? Listen to more things at double speed, of course.

I have calculated that at this rate he will have lived an entire life before forty. After that I suppose it gets boring.

It began during the pandemic. My husband was given a dollop of sourdough by a colleague, and it has lived with us ever since. It has a name. It has its own shelf in the fridge. It is fed more often than the cat.

I have nothing against bread. But when a man asks how the dough is “feeling” before he asks how I am, something has gone too far.

Am I alone in living in a three-way relationship, one third of which is yeast?