"What makes a human being?" wonders Eva Trout, the eponymous heroine of Elizabeth Bowen's last novel. Eva has been much neglected as a child and has trouble handling language, or even thought.
In an effort to find out how to become a human being she invests in all the latest gadgets: recording machine, a large-screen television set, a gramophone, a 16-millimetre projector, even a computer in the hope that it will teach her how to think. At that time (1959), Eva's computer must have filled an entire room of her house.
I remember being taken, in the early 1970s, to see the computers in Newcastle University's department of computer studies. The computers were taller than me and looked a great deal more complicated. The idea that one day I would be able to work on one of these things without taking a degree in computer studies and that it would fit easily into a bag which I could carry around with me would have seemed like something out of science fiction. Times have moved on. I fear that our household with its accumulation of gadgets and machines is starting to resemble Eva Trout's. The worry is that, instead of making us more like human beings, this accumulation of gadgetry is starting to turn us into machines. We are becoming half-human, half-machine, cyborgs in fact.
I collect my son from school.
"Had a good day?" Grunt.
"What did you do?"
"Stuff." He frowns, indicating that this is all the conversation he is prepared to engage in and that even this has stretched his resources. His thumbs start to twitch. Out comes the mobile phone. He starts texting the friends he left half-a-minute ago in that strange, half-human language that they use. "RUL84T?"
My other son phones to say he is five minutes away from home. I have not been worrying about him, so why does he do this? So that I will have the door open for him? He comes through the door still speaking to me via his mobile phone. Perhaps he feels more comfortable putting a machine between himself and another human being.
The boys retreat to their rooms. The sound of click-clicking comes from one room as one of them plays on his Gameboy, while from the other the CD player belts out the ear-splitting rock music the inmate insists helps him to "really concentrate, Mum" on his homework.
My partner comes in. I ask him a question about his schedule. He gets out his Blackberry and hooks himself up to his electronic diary.
It takes a while to locate the data - surely turning a page in a diary would be quicker? I know better than to say this out loud. He takes the opportunity of being on his Blackberry to reply to a couple of e-mails. Our conversation is left unfinished.
Later we go for a walk. My partner brings his hobby along with him, namely his camera. Whereas previously we would have wandered along reflecting together on this and that, the "walk" now consists of me hanging around while he adjusts the zoom on his Panasonic Lumix to get the perfect shot. While I'm all for this hobby of his, I can't help feeling that yet another machine has intruded on our relationship.
The family that eats together, stays together. Not in our household.
The idea of eating together during the week is a perfect anathema to the children, who have their personal TV schedules worked out. They end up eating in different rooms in front of different TVs. The word dysfunctional creeps into my brain. Later, the younger boy wanders around the house listening to music on his iPod through earphones. Holding any sort of conversation with him involves standing in front of him and flapping my arms to get him to switch the wretched thing off.
Meanwhile the other son spends half the evening with the phone receiver clamped to his ear, chatting to his friends. Half-human, half-machine.
Holidays, you would think, are the perfect time to get rid of the machines. The camera comes with us, but the mobile phones, the PlayStation, the CD player stay at home. However, this time on our holiday another little gadget turned up. The car we hired in Germany turned out to have a navigation system. A low, sultry woman's voice came on: "Your route is now prepared. If possible turn around and take the next right." My partner glanced at me. "So that's all right. We won't need you to map-read."
I slumped in my seat. Replaced by a machine. And don't think I didn't notice the relief in his voice. She - we liked to call her Gloria - directed us unerringly to our rented accommodation. I felt an inferiority complex coming on.
Gloria accompanied us during the whole of our holiday in Germany. She became like one of the family - one of the better behaved members. Not once did she flap when we took a wrong turning. She never stamped her foot and screamed, "Where the hell do you think you're going, you fool?" She never crumpled up the map and chucked it out of the window. Quite a little holiday romance developed between Gloria and my partner. In fact there were days when I suspected him of taking the car out for a run just to hear her deep, seductive tones reassuring him he was going in the right direction.
In France, apparently, navigation systems use a male voice since it has been found that Frenchmen don't like taking instructions from a woman. I'm making no comment on that one. We did discover that the more expensive the car, the more polite the voice. We hired a cheaper model for a couple of days and the voice on its navigation system was much more abrupt, omitted to say "please", and got quite shirty with us if we made a wrong turn. Do the people who programme these things believe that people who hire cheaper cars don't appreciate good manners? "I miss Gloria," my partner sighed.
"Oh really?" I sneered. "Perhaps you'd like to send her a postcard when we get back home." I consoled myself with the thought that holiday romances rarely last beyond September.
Yet I can't entirely condemn machines. They do practically all the housework for me. They wash the clothes, clean the dishes, percolate the coffee. All I need is a friendly little robot to do the dusting for me. I'll call her Sarah.
It will be nice to have another girl around the house. Who knows? We might even become friends.