A thousand tech journalists have already put this decade in a time-capsule and marked it mobile. Everything’s moved to a screen, gone flatter, gone smaller. Your phone’s a laptop, your laptop’s a telly, your telly’s a cinema. Your local cinema is closed.
And now, everyone’s gibbering on about shifting the way we read onto these faceless tablets which owe more to mobile chess-sets than design degrees; say more about luggage restrictions than an actual market requirement.
With Kindle and e-readers generally, they’re saying that this is how we’ll read books in the future. Reading 2.0, they probably want to say. And, by inference, they’re kind of suggesting that eventually, physical books will be obsolete.
But I don’t think that’s true – and I hope they don’t mean it.
Flat viewing
The estate agent is a special kind of bastard: a kid in a suit from most angles, late by an hour from the rest. The shirt’s nice at least, but his collar’s tight, rolling his neck up into his face – and the wispy moustache makes you wonder if he’s snorted the cat with the rest of his baggie. As it goes, I saw his Audi and made the call – but when he said my girlfriend sounded gorgeous on the phone I moved to attack formation and didn’t look back. And now we’re in a lift together.
The development, it opens up from the middle. Flats fall either side of the lifts, and the long brown corridors go every which way but home. It’s a maze after four pints, is what I reckon, and I’m already lost with the minotaur.
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