How things do change

I had my conversation on the phone, and crossed the room to replace the receiver.

Where had the telephone base gone? I had that sudden return to concentration that you have when you’re doing something automatically and it’s suddenly not so simple.

“The phone must have fallen down the back [of the unit]” I announced to Maggie. It was quite a tight squeeze, and we fished around for quite a few mad moments. In the course of which, the jostled answerphone decided to play all our voicemails from where it wedged against the wall. Messages long forgotten, long superseded, long irrelevant formed into one long litany of “Hello! This is — ” “I’m going to delete all these” Maggie announced grimly. Of course we’d had little idea they still existed.

Afterwards, I had the post-Covid reaction to all those helpful announcements, many prior to this year. How things have changed.

My father eventually used to say that about everything. Born in 1910, the world went to war in his childhood and again in the early years of his marriage. The last fifty-five years of his life were at least free from World Wars (the second of which probably caused me to be five years younger than ‘I’ might otherwise have been). It was, of course, perceived changes at the latter end of his lifespan which troubled him. Though he practically missed the greatest change of my own lifetime, which was universal computerisation — not the exploration of the Solar System, as we were led to believe when we were children.

The most daily evident changes people have to take on board are those affecting language, and those affecting money. I had to explain to my father that fax — by this time routinely listed on letterheads — was nothing to do with filofax, a form of business stationery that for some reason was held to represent the very essence of the yuppy ’eighties.

And a Midsomer Murders we watched on TV this week turned on how easily older people can lose track of monetary values, especially regarding property. But I never did have any money sense, so I’m always at square one.

And television reminds us how speech changes, particularly by the anachronisms in the dialogue of programmes set in earlier decades.

I’ve seen an interesting discussion of how far back you’d have to go in time before your own language would be incomprehensible to you. A surprisingly short way, apparently. You can get an idea of this from written material. In the nineteenth century they seemed to use “will” and “shall” quite differently.

Back to my father. One of his Shakespeare quotes came from having played the Abbot of Westminster in “Richard II” when he was at school. There’s a photograph. What he quoted was in fact his cue, which he always rendered as “You holy clargymen, is there no plot to rid the realm of this pernicious blot?” So was there really a pronunciation in the ’twenties of ‘clergy’ as ‘clargy’? Perhaps a ‘posh’ one — such as English teachers might urge on boys playing Shakespeare? My father, first generation ‘white collar’, son and grandson of carpenters, once opined “Affected people say ‘Cuvventry’.” But he always quoted ‘clargymen’. Perhaps there was a stage convention, like some words did acquire. I don’t know.

During this rather untypical year I have got over some of my dislike of being read to, and explored the wealth of narrated material one can find online. Including one novel, slightly revised and abridged, whose modifications included every ‘should’ being changed to ‘would’ — as in “why should/would he say …?” — as part of updating it for modern listeners.

How things have changed.