Richard Baum

I was staring vacantly out of my office window this morning, wondering whether five days of desk-based tedium could be topped by five minutes of close contact with a white hot shard of flaming metal direct to my temporal lobe, when I saw a plane coming in to land at the airport, and it jolted me into realizing that maybe the world and everything in it isn’t so skull-crackingly horrific after all.

Just floating there in the sky. Looking like it was barely moving. A flying machine taking people places! Just 200 years since we all worked in fields with oxen pulling ploughs! A giant whirring mass of engineering and technology, actually doing what it is supposed to do, and not spluttering to a reason-less halt and being hurled at the wall in frustration like so much else these days.

I knew that the plane was moving of course, because it didn’t plummet to the ground in a ball of fire and burning kerosene. But it looked so graceful up there. A gorgeous gliding bird of human endeavour. A massive testament to all we’ve achieved and all we can do in the future. How the hell does a 300 tonne winged tube of metal get anywhere near moving at all, let alone doing so 35,000 feet in the air with not a string in sight?

Hundreds of people moving at hundreds of miles per hour. And I just thought about what an incredible age we’re all alive in. These are the days of miracle and wonder – a man on that speeding aeroplane making a call on his mobile phone to a man on another aeroplane on the other side of the world. Man alive… And those little cars at the airport with the steps on them! Amazing! Steps! On Wheels!

I know that planes pollute the skies and that every third person in economy has developed an airborne lung infection or a thrombosis by the end of the flight, but we’re working on fixing that. Just savour the good stuff for the moment. You can get to Spain for the summer if you want, without voyaging on the high seas or taking a fortnight in a carriage. And all you have to fear is losing your suitcase and getting Chlamydia.

And the good stuff doesn’t end there either. The Leader of the Bury Lib Dem council group has just bagged himself an iPhone, and was showing it to us yesterday. An iPhone. A piece of kit so sensationally futuristic it may as well come with light sabers and teleportation portals. It’s a piece of hand-held magic that, if you think about it, well… you can’t actually think about it because it does things that are way beyond the wit of most normal human beings. If it’d been brought up in a Star Trek script-writers meeting it may well have been laughed out of the room.

All you have to do is touch the screen and it does things. And not just random things. Things you tell it to do. Music, emails, the internet, a phone. All in one. And more stuff I don’t even know about! There’s a thing it does whereby if a photo is taken sideways, all you have to do is waggle the iPhone around in your hand and it automatically switches the photo the right way round. The most pointless piece of brilliance I’ve ever seen. And yeah, most of it is blatantly not required by anyone except the most bone-drillingly obnoxious gizmo geek, but normal people can have great fun with it too, and you’re never gonna be bored if you own one, are you?

This time of iPhones and jumbo planes is just an amazing time to be alive. And to think, at the rate we’re going now, my kids will probably look upon the iPhone with a mixture of open contempt and the type of sneering superiority we currently reserve for the whirring clockwork innards of the Sinclair Spectrum. In thirty years they’ll probably be able to destroy all of the world’s iPhones in one go simply using the harnessed power of thought. Or, as it will then be known, iBrain.

So next time the world brings you close to leaping head-first from a cliff-top into the pleasurable sanctity of the abyss, remember how lucky we are to be alive at the moment. It’s a strange thought, but needless poncy Apple gadgetry and airborne sardine-tin climate-changers have brought a smile to my face this morning. No mean feat.

Rick