The Pink Zebra
The Pink Zebra
How our internet went down for a week and it mildly impacted my life.
I wrote this week’s offering last night in my head as I fell asleep.
I called it “The Pink Zebra” in honour of my old bicycle, of the same name. It was a yellow mountain bike onto which, the week before Burning Man in August 2008, I laboriously grafted stripes in pink duct tape (including on each spoke, you heard me) and the words “pink zebra” in little pieces of ripped up tape across the frame.
It was a trash heap stunning masterpiece, as you can see, and served me faithfully for years after that.
At Burning Man and beyond, shipped across the Atlantic to London, where I fannied about on it, from pub to library and back again, from Borough to Holborn, Highgate to Finsbury Park, always on the Pink Zebra — until the sad, sad day some paramecium brain stole it.
I consoled myself with the thought that maybe they just had really refined taste, a hankering for authentic Burning Man memorabilia. Sometimes I search the internet to see if a vintage Burning Man bicycle is on offer on eBay, somewhere out there, with that unmistakeable Pink Zebra je ne sais quoi.
But alas.
Anyway, as I say, I woke up this morning with this week’s newsletter in my head, named and ready to go but sadly, no idea what the Pink Zebra had to do with it. I get such brilliant ideas right before I fall asleep but, often, it’s that kind of dreamscape brilliance where it falls apart just when you try and look at it a bit more closely. Oh well. If you ever see someone riding a bike with pink duct-taped stripes, maybe get in touch?
The thing I actually wanted to write about was the fact that our internet is down.
Our internet is down.
It has been down for many days. Joel is beside himself.
He paces. He fumes. He checks our service provider’s web page for updates every five minutes.
“They’re applying for traffic permits.”
“It’s down in all of Surrey (we don’t live in Surrey).”
“Traffic permits granted for Monday 30th (that’s in like a week).”
“Hoping to have an ETA by the end of today.”
“Estimate all customers will be back online by end of day on the 31st.”
“(On the 31st) Engineers have identified a new cause of the problem. We are now working on developing a new fix plan.”
Isn’t that brilliant? They are working on developing a new Fix Plan. It’s beautiful, masterful. I’ve never read anything more meaningless in my life.
Where I am relatively stoic in the face of an internet drought, Joel tethers with single-minded intensity, like a junkie, balancing his phone on a curtain rail at the back of the house. (We live in a valley, shaded by tall trees. Lovely! Also: a 4G dead zone.)
He is, after all, a millennial of a more sprightly vintage than your geriatric narrator and doesn’t really remember not having internet on tap. His job, really his entire being, is written in code. Super fast broadband is his lifeblood. Take that away and, well.
It’s been a long week.
Or has it?
I would say, actually it’s been an uncommonly fun week.
Because the thing is (and boy oh boy is he going to shit crowbars when he reads this!) I am kind of, quietly, actually quite happy without internet. Without internet, phones don’t update. There is less pointless
scrolling, less frequent notifications. The phone screen is not out at the dinner table. There is actual engagement. We have nice conversations and laugh and joke. Life is, all things considered, pretty good.I harness hobbies and venture out to a knitting group! I host mates round in the guise of a book club (actually to eat cheese and drink wine). I unburden myself about some worries I had with village life after a country music festival in the village last summer was patronised by a horde of Confederate-flag waving attendees. One of my mates is suitably appalled at this and vows to adopt the “White Supremacists Not Welcome” cause with the local councillor, which warms my heart immensely. Joel rallies for the wine but remains largely fractious (I dub him Lord Grumpypants, which surprisingly does little to lighten his mood).
He needs a project. A new pair of boots arrive for me in the post (and, oh they are lovely things, thank you William Lennon). He spends many minutes lacing, re-lacing and then optimally re-lacing them. There are, it turns out, as many different ways of tying a shoelace as there are types of shoes.
I suggest we get out of the house.
We go to Bath to see the, er, Baths and Avebury, to see the stones and Britain’s most ancient road.
In the Baths, my favourite bit is the gemstones that fell out of people’s rings or were chucked in as offerings. People from all over the Roman Empire came to Bath to get into that water and their rings are varied, gorgeous, personal, with detailed decorations, some no larger than my pinky finger. My favourite sports the head of a maenad, a female follower of Bacchus the god of wine. From across the planes of time and space, I feel an immediate kinship with the woman who wore that ring and lost it down the drain (I don’t think she’d have chucked it).
Joel, on the other hand, contemplates for whole minutes some Latin inscriptions. It reads well, he says. He loves a good code. No capitals at the start of sentences. Those impenetrable rows of text sound a Siren call and, off the back of our visit to the Roman baths, he decides to learn Latin and immediately downloads Duolingo.
Two thousand years later, some people still loathe the idea of the Roman Empire — outsiders, conquerors, colonists of our Pagan druidic forbears — and, while they definitely have a point, the Romans sure did get around. They could be from anywhere and they could go anywhere. A Roman citizen sitting in the caldarium in Aquae Sulis
might be from Rome, or she might be from Syria. It is a strong currency of empire; that currency of free movement, and the sense of belonging without borders.Let’s go back to the Pink Zebra. I think maybe (this is a maaaaaassive stretch but bear with me) the point of the Pink Zebra might have been to underline the fact that I too get around a lot.
You may have already picked up on this but, if you haven’t, let me reveal with some conclusivity: I get around a lot. Minds out of the gutter, I don’t mean THAT way (although…). I mean I get around a lot in the sense of: has lived in many places. Has many leather-bound passports (two, anyway). Struggles very much to answer the simple question, where are you from? You know the kind. We’re the ones that Theresa May hated, the ones who are from everywhere and also kind of nowhere.
Back to Avebury.
After a cycle on the Ridgeway, the sun set and the full moon rose over the largest stone circle in the world.
We pitched up in a pub for dinner. As is my wont, I eavesdropped on the two older men at the next table. And this is what I heard:
“Do you read books? I was good at English, me. I read a good book recently, about how we’re all going to hell in a handcart, you know, with the immigrants and that.”
“What’s the next book you want to read?”
“The Guns at August, you know about World War One. I don’t know why they called it a World War, it wasn’t really the whole world was it.”
“Oh well, the US came into it didn’t they.”
“Oh right yeah, dunno why they came. Sticking their noses in. And like in World War Two, Russia got in too.”
“Germany invaded them didn’t they?”
“Oh yeah. Well, anyway, not like Russia now! Couldn’t invade a paper bag. Ukraine held them off for over a year now. I wonder what it would be like if Russia came and tried that here, like would we all band together and fight them off? Same as in WWII all kind of sticking together and that? Now, there’s so many different nationalities and different kinds of people here and like would they all stick together? Who knows.”
“Well, and it’s the same in the army. When I was first commissioned, they wanted to let women in. I was on the committee at the time and I kicked up merry hell. There’s just some things women are better at and some things men are better at, like physical things. I mean if a grenade is flung at me, I want 18-stone Derek holding up a shield not Tilley who’s 5ft3.”
Now, my usual approach would be to inform each that he is an uncommon ignoramus and show myself the door.
However, the evening — or at least my warm feeling towards Avebury — was saved by Barry, the elderly gentleman sat drinking pints in quiet solitude by the bar. I noticed that when we got the chess board out, he half rotated his chair so he could half observe the game.
After we have paid up, he hails me. He’s heard my accent.
“Where are you from?”
Now. This is my least favourite question to be asked (well, one of) and my least favourite way of being asked it is by an older white man in a pub in Little Britain.
I am about to go with my slightly world-weary “where do you think I’m from” patter, when Joel chimes in and says we are from Oxfordshire, down for the day. And the old boy looks confused so I admit, yes, we live in Oxfordshire but as you can tell I am not from there. I’m Irish and American. I could go on like I usually do (yes, I’ve lived in both; no, the American bit isn’t Irish) but I leave it at that.
And he tells me, haltingly (for he is elderly and has had many pints) that he isn’t from around here either, he’s from up north, from the city of Preston and went to the University of Manchester. He’s always lived in cities, he’s not from a small village, never lived in a small village before, even though he lives in one now (this very one in fact, in a house not 70m away).
And it hits me, the perpetual outsider, that everyone feels like an outsider. Probably every single person on the face of the earth, at some point, feels like an outsider. Even this very English chap in his very English village. Probably those other two lost souls in the corner feel their own lost kind of outsider-ness. And it makes them nervous, keen to find their tribe, to close the circle.
I shook Barry’s hand and thanked him loudly for being so welcoming. He said “it would be wonderful to see you back here again sometime”. Maybe someday I will go back to the New Inn in Winterbourne Monkton and have a game of chess with Barry.
What I will also do, I have decided, is something I have long resisted, and that is: apply for a British passport. I am a citizen of everywhere, and nowhere. So I may as well be a citizen of here; the country in which I have just now, this year, lived more than any other.
If nothing else, I will at least be able to continue to keep an eye out for my Pink Zebra on Britain’s roads and online marketplaces.
Joel would like the record to state that there is in fact now MORE pointless scrolling. Because the scrolling doesn’t update, so it is therefore pointless. To which my response (if I was going to make a response) is that there is less scrolling OVERALL, even if a greater proportion of this limited scrolling has even less purpose than it usually does. The defence rests, Your Honour.
Latin name for the town now called Bath.