The office party season is, as I write, entering full swing. I’ve been to three thus far – beside the main whole paper event, some departments stage their own. One such soirée took me all the way up to the 68th floor of the Shard, our next-door neighbour here at London Bridge. Great party, dreadful view: the capital stretching out in all directions, Post Office tower (as I still insist on calling it) a mere toy twinkling off to the west, Wembley arch beyond it, river a thin silvery ribbon, the Times’ own HQ – no slouch at 17 floors – utterly dwarfed.
Or at least I assume it was – geometry and fear being what they are, visual confirmation would have taken me far too close to the window for comfort.
I’m not a great one for heights. Not heights attained via manmade structures, at any rate. Hills are fine. Mountains, likewise. Even cliffs, within reason. As for bridges, fairground rides, aeroplanes and indeed absurdly altitudinous skyscrapers that move perceptibly in the breeze – not fine. Not fine at all.
Apart from the specific issue of mild vertigo, I also feel – without wishing to sound even more antiquated than I actually am – that there is something fundamentally arrogant and unnatural about tall buildings. They unnerve me. Atheist as I am, I would hesitate to use the word ungodly – suffice to say such edifices strike me as hubristic, lacking any of the humility with which a wise man seeks to proceed through this life.
Towers, basically, scare the s*** out of me. My own humble work station is on the 11th floor – which means it’s about 120ft above terra firma, give or take. Not a survivable distance, in other words. I’ve considered buying some climbing rope and keeping it in my desk drawer. I reckon I need 200ft, because the canteen is on the 14th floor – 156ft up – and I spend quite a bit of time up there. Naturally, I’m factoring in some generous extra length for purposes of anchoring one end around a pillar, tying lots of knots, etc.
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Sadly it’s not practical to take 200ft of climbing rope with me every time I fancy a sandwich. Furthermore, decent rope is, I discover, shockingly expensive.
Given the mistrust outlined above suggests correctly that I am yet fully to come to terms with some technologies perfected way back in the infancy of the 20th century, it won’t surprise anyone to learn that I also struggle with many developments associated with these early years of the 21st.
Not on Facebook. Can’t do bank transfers. Did PayPal once and never again. Never done Uber. Never bought anything off Amazon, iTunes or eBay. Never checked in for a flight online. Never downloaded an app. Don’t know what buffering or streaming mean. Even though my stat obsession requires moderately complicated daily mathematics, I don’t trust the calculator on my phone so I lug around a chunky Seventies-era big button contraption instead.
As for Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter – take a wild guess. A long-standing colleague at the Shard party shared her view that now every last middle-class person in Britain has given up cigarettes, where we writers once used to stop for a smoke, now we break off our labours to check our Twitter feeds. “I still just go out for a fag,” I told her.
Obviously, I don’t have any use for Tinder. And equally obviously, even if I were single and looking for a partner and thus did have a use for Tinder, I’d sit indoors and watch the telly rather than logging on. Dammit, I’d chew my own toes off first.
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I do have a gay friend who’s well into Grindr, however. Any spare moment and he’s swiping and scrolling like a man possessed. Sitting in Victoria Park in east London on a summer Saturday, he says, his mobile is pinging away like crazy, signalling dozens of potential dates within a 50-metre radius. Never mind the pouting selfies on screen; he just has to glance around the grass to see what he fancies.
Heading home from the Shard do mid-evening, waiting patiently for the 48 bus, a group of women in their twenties, several of them wearing Santa hats, clearly fresh from their own festive fun, happened along. “Would you mind taking a picture of me and my mates?” one asked, passing me her phone.
“Sure thing,” I replied – and proceeded, after numerous attempts, to fail to do the necessary. Fingers over lens. Activated video function instead. Got confused by yellow squares appearing in viewfinder. Finally simply turned whole device off by pressing the wrong button. “Never mind,” the young woman commiserated, looking around for a suitably younger and more switched-on candidate to ask instead. “At least you didn’t run off with my phone.”
I suppose I ought to be flattered she thought I had the energy.
robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk