Looking at Great Britain through Windows

Thee are times, I can’t help thinking, that Great Britain really deserves that adjective. I’m not talking about long-lost empires based on men in freshly-pressed suits planting flags in the ground in front of the natives and declaring their country is now British. I’m talking about the people who have lived in Britain.

I’m not talking about the latest batch, obviously. There is very little in David Beckham’s ability to shuffle his golden balls around an acre of grass trying not to break a metatarsal that would rank him alongside Sir Isaac Newton. There’s very little about Lily Allen’s fine pop-ditties that would make me think that in 100 years time there’ll be an annual series of concerts in the Albert Hall where people who’ve queued outside so long their children have gone from nursery school to University sing ‘The Fear’ in the way they dance along to Sir Elgar’s ‘Pomp and Circumstance’.

I’m thinking of the greats. I’m thinking of Oliver Cromwell, Michael Faraday, Edward Jenner and JRR Tolkien.

An unlikely batch perhaps, but there is a common trend – they were all achieving greatness in an age before computers. And the more I think about it, the less I can think of a single human being to achieve true greatness using a small tin box of silicon chips.

Having just spent 2 days trying trying to coax a computer back to life I can see why. If Oliver Cromwell had owned a PC his New Model Army would have arrived at Naseby 2 days late and dressed in desert camouflage due to clicking on the wrong file, and Charles I would have escaped execution due to a typo.

Michael Faraday wouldn’t have had an easy ride either. For a start, all of his electro-magnets would have played havoc with his hard drive. He’d have had to start again at least twice due to his system crashing, and would have spent so much time fiddling with the layouts of his PowerPoint presentations he’d have forgotten to name the electron.

You need only look at the news of NHS computer systems creating huge waiting lists to imagine that Jenner would have missed the smallpox cure, and Lord of the Rings would have been substantially shorter after the first 200 pages had been missed by the auto-save.

Why do we put up with these things? Computers aren’t helpful; generally they’re rude, arrogant and temperamental. When something goes wrong they make a shrill sound, and a big box arrives on the screen with a big red cross telling you that you’ve caused a ‘terminal error’, when really they should say ‘I’m dreadfully sorry, but I didn’t manage to do that properly for you so I’ll try harder next time’. There’s a general attitude that it’s always the user’s fault.

I spent some time this weekend watching Windows install itself. As I sat there watching a pale blue screen installing what is pretty much the only operating system around my mind started to wander. Mostly where in the garden I could bury it if it didn’t work this time, or what speed I could run it over without doing too much damage to my car.

Why do we put up with them? It doesn’t happen elsewhere in life. You don’t go to a rock concert and see AC/DC walk off in silence halfway through Highway To Hell. You don’t see Sir Ian McKellen walking off halfway through Waiting For Godot saying the audience coughed in the wrong place. A surgeon doesn’t suddenly fall asleep with Mrs Jone’s lower intestine in his hands, and your train to Edinburgh doesn’t terminate unexpectedly at Hull. Unless you’re travelling with Virgin Trains.

I can’t guarantee we can all achieve greatness, but I can guarantee that no ‘Great Britain’ will ever emerge whilst they’re relying on a computer.