A Somerset Lad

Every Saturday, the Daily Mail must be bought for my mother. The newspaper itself is incidental to the weekly television guide included in the magazine. The programmes for the week are planned carefully, mostly the BBC 1, 2 and 4, with an occasional excursion into ITV and satellite channels.

The single most important element of her viewing has always been the local news, access to which has sometimes been erratic.

There was one evening when the ITN news ended and we waited for the West Country news. It seemed odd, the stories did not relate to anywhere we knew. Then came the weather forecast, would there be rain in Somerset in the morning? We were never to find out, instead the following day’s meteorological predictions for Birmingham were shared by a woman whose accent was definitely not Bristolian. Afterwards, a caption appeared on the screen, “ITV Central.”

“Oh dear,” said my sister, “the storm must have been stronger than we thought, we seem to have been blown North.” The idea of being blown three counties northward  by a strong gale conjured visions of it landing on the Midland equivalent of the Wicked Witch of the West. All it would need would a young Dorothy to step out of the town into a Birmingham Land of Oz.

Rather than the sudden displacement of an entire community, the explanation seemed more likely to be that the digital television set had switched from its default signal to one from a neighbouring region.

Once, when visiting my parents  on holiday, I had switched the preferred BBC satellite channel from that for the West to that for Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. My mother had come in to watch the evening news and had followed the stories for some minutes before declaring, “There is something wrong with this television, this isn’t our news.”

More recently, the Freeview box decided High Ham had moved south-west and carried stories of Devon and Cornwall instead of Bristol and Somerset. Only a search through the various control options had revealed that it was possible to change the default channels; Bristol was recovered and all was right with the world.

Digital broadcasting can bring an abundance of choice, but also a dislocation. Gone are the times when one’s choice was entirely determined by geography. Terrestrial digital television has some geographical reference, but satellite digital broadcasts allows the potential to listen to anything from anywhere. And if the television does not provide adequate choice, then online broadcasting adds innumerably more opportunities.

The extension of choice brings with it the loss of a community dimension. Like the local newspaper, the local television news brought one the news of one’s own place, it created a sense of shared stories, a sense of identification with a place, a sense of being part of somewhere. Digital dislocation breaks the ties of former times, it is as if one had been suddenly gathered up in the wind and set down in a distant city.

Beneath the crest on the front of my sweatshirt, the motto read, “rerum cognoscere causas.”

“What does that mean asked someone in the Glastonbury pub?”

“To know the causes of things,” I said.

“What does that mean?” they replied.

There didn’t seem much point in continuing the conversation. Feeling an outsider at the London School of Economics, I now found I felt myself an outsider in my own community.

Knowing the causes of things had been a theme throughout my childhood.

My father worked as a radio and radar technician on naval jets and seemed regularly to have to attend training courses. It didn’t occur to me that the constant change in technology that required my father’s attention was something that should have been reassuring, it meant the military were constantly making progress.

Being inquiring meant being discontent with those who unquestioningly accepted dogma of any sort. A confrontation of a spirit of inquiry and dogmatic assumptions would come when a man from a nearby village came to see my hairdresser mother for a haircut. The man belonged to an evangelical chapel that sat below the hill on which our village was situated. He was a fundamentalist Christian who rejected science and espoused creationism. Worst of all, he would insist upon challenging my father with his views.

Neither side ever made any ground, but I came to understand that science was something that progressed, that it developed by constant testing and questioning of theories and a preparedness to set aside arguments that were no longer tenable.

In the decades that followed those conversations, my father continued to adapt. We bought him an iPad for his eightieth birthday. Waking at 6.30 each morning, the first thing he did was to open the BBC app to read the day’s news. After lunch, he would sit at his computer desk, open YouTube on the browser, and watch black and white war films and Westerns.

Science, technology, a search for the causes of all things were assumptions. He could not understand those who believed things that were not proven.

Watching the news this evening, he would have been unsurprised by the stories of the virus having mutated. Natural selection would dictate such a process. The strain of virus that will emerge at each stage is the strain that has survived, it is the strain that has been able to continue despite government efforts to prevent the process of transmission. Of course, each strain that emerges will be stronger than its predecessors, had it not been so, it would not have emerged.

Were there a possibility of recreating those conversations between my father and the creationist having his haircut, the adaptation of the virus would have been a good illustration of natural selection, a process without consciousness or design.

Did people in the Nineteenth Century have better eyesight? The print in some books is so extraordinarily small that it is a wonder that it could have been read by the lamplight or candles which lit the average house. Anyone who has seen a copy of a Prayer Book from Victorian times can only wonder at how the faithful gathered in dimly-lit churches followed the service.

Oddly, it was reading Mojo magazine that brought memories of antiquarian books. It must be the only publication that uses what appears to be 6 font in some of the boxes inset into features.

Not wanting to miss details, I held the magazine at various angles. If held it in front of my face, at a particular distance, in a good light, I could read the list of records that accompanied a feature on a band.

Wearing varifocals since the summer, I have had to learn that being able to see something depends on how I look at it. The optician persuaded me that if I paid for the most expensive lenses, there would be no motion sickness that might be experienced. He was right, but his being correct came at a price considerably greater than anticipated.

Being prepared to concede to the need of wearing glasses at all was only something that came in adult life, vanity forbade an admission of myopia.

It was during schooldays in Devon that I was subjected to an eye test by an optician from Newton Abbot. It seems odd in retrospect that our school should have regarded itself as responsible for testing. Of course, there was no choice as to the style of glasses we might have: the standard NHS style was all that was on offer. There was choice about colour, brown or black. I hated the glasses and would only wear them in the darkened common room to watch Match of the Day on a Saturday night.

At Sixth Form college, I got a pair of my choosing. They might have had more style, but lacked much quality. The lenses regularly fell out and the screws at the sides had to be secured in place using nail varnish. Through university days I persisted with squinting, not until graduation did I finally admit that I needed to wear glasses all the time.

Glasses have now become an enhancement rather than a disadvantage. I broke my last frames when falling ski-ing in 2017 and decided when getting the varifocals to keep the designer frames I bought at an optician in Bad Hofgastein, mostly because the new lenses cost so much that there was no budget for new frames. Looking in the mirror now, the glasses make me look younger (fifty-nine rather than sixty).