A Somerset Lad

The June edition of The Roundabout came through the door, the monthly magazine of the parishes around Langport. The magazine must be forty years old, established after the local benefices were combined as a team. It has a glossy cover now – with coloured photographs – a change from the times of stencil and duplicator. Mostly the news is of church activities, with obituaries of those who had been buried with their forebears in village churchyards that have a timeless quality.

There is a monthly free newspaper The Langport Leveller, which has a circulation of ten thousand copies, but it lacks the rootedness found in a parish magazine. Well-written and professionally produced, its problem is that it could be about anywhere. It is strongly political in its lead stories and editorial, but given the sterility of English politics, it is sometimes dull reading, the death of a old neighbour is infinitely more interesting than wranglings at county hall.

The Western Gazette, a tabloid now, with a much reduced circulation from former times, was the newspaper that described the world of my childhood and youth. As with many newspapers, its title was more expansive than the community it represented. Its coverage was of the affairs of Yeovil and south Somerset, the description of the area as “western” would have seemed odd to anyone living in Devon and Cornwall; High Ham is closer to London than to Saint Ives, and we were at the western side of the area in which the  Western Gazette circulated.

The Western Gazette had the news that really mattered to someone too young to vote and whose understanding of the outside world was determined by whatever might be gleaned from BBC television news. The stories were of local events featuring names that were recognizable. The newspaper covered the stuff of village life, particularly the funerals. The obituary reports would have a brief note on the deceased and then a list of those who were present at the funeral service. A reporter with a notebook would stand at the church gate taking everyone’s names; it was important not to be missed out, and, if present by oneself, to be sure to tell the reporter the names of family members one represented.

The Western Gazette helped created a sense of community because it specified the community of which it was a part. Unlike a local radio station, whose boundaries of listenership are vague, and definitely unlike a website, which is without any geographical bounds of readership, the Western Gazette’s coverage and circulation were specific.

When people complain about a loss of sense of community, asking f they buy the local newspaper might be telling.

“Uncle Ian, they have a vintage arcade game in the pub now, you would enjoy it.”

It would have been churlish to say, “No, I wouldn’t!” It would have been hard to explain that I think I was born far too early to ever be adept at electronic games.

The game where you played table tennis with two controllers connected to your television, which you could obtain cheap with vouchers from Corn Flakes boxes,  came out when I was at boarding school; there was great competition to use it at first, but after a while it seemed slightly absurd to try to play table tennis with an electronic controller, when it was much more fun playing with a table tennis bat in the games room.

By the time I was a student, Space Invaders proved beyond any doubt that I was not cut out to save Planet Earth. I stuck to the pinball table if I wanted to waste 10 pence pieces, it was much more mechanical and responded directly to physical force, usually with the “Tilt” light coming on, resulting in the loss of one of the three balls.

By the mid-80s there had been a revolution and I had been left a long way behind; the kids at the local rectory roared with laughter at my attempts at Donkey Kong. By the mid-90s there was Gameboy and the like. There was no prospect that the Super Mario brothers would ever rescue the princess under my guidance; they rarely got beyond the first level.

Once the children had gone beyond the age of playing Gameboy, electronic games disappeared from the household. There was still an online role-playing game played by the older of the offspring that demanded a few dollars a month, but it was not about the frantic pressing of buttons in order to zap virtual enemies.

What has been astonishing in recent times is that electronic games have extended their grip into the lives of adults; people, particularly men, can spend hours on Play Stations and X Boxes.  People who in former generations went to the pub and played darts and snooker and pool with their mates, or did DIY stuff in their houses, or worked in their gardens, now sit in front of a screen pressing buttons, in a quest for what?  The advertisements for the games can be quite bizarre; one for a war game suggesting it demanded particular personal qualities to play it.

What happened that real living came to be replaced by a virtual existence, that people who might have been out playing real soccer became content with a version on a screen; that men who in former generations might have been fighting actual wars, came to think that an electronic simulation of gore and blood and death and slaughter was somehow a worthwhile leisure activity; that reality became replaced by something virtual, something very far from reality?

Our primary school teacher always told us that inanimate objects could not be stupid, so if spending hours on unreal activities cannot be stupid, it is plain silly.