Chos Malal: we’ve accumulated a supply of material, a need to do some business, we need to communicate. We need a hot spot. It’s a Sunday so we’re negated from one source, the internet café, the locotorio, yet several named addresses are available. So the Navigator cum Forager lives up to her title and heads off on the hunt to divine and source a connection. Eventually success comes from a new and unexpected source - the local hospital. It even has a shaded bench right outside.
We can now communicate, until the battery power gives out, or the techno gremlins in league with that supreme of the thwart: Señor Murphy interfere. There was a time when you searched for a landline, now that’s a sign of the old times. In these new times, with the advance of mobile ‘phones, finding a public call box is near impossible. They were never a common piece of street furniture here; people relied on the locutorio, yet these too are in decline, some we locate have their windows covered over with fading, five year old newspapers. Closed for siesta, closed never to reopen again.
Sometimes you feel that the Victorian explorers of a previous age had an easier time of it. Maybe they didn’t have the advantages of accurate maps, NHS travel clinics or clean bed linen, but they could get away with a note sent home to their sponsors every second year. An attachment to a cargo of plundered curios and a box of specimen plants. It was Dervla Murphy who tells of the pleasure of travelling in a pre internet age, in the Shah’s Iran. She would be unable to contact any of her kin for a whole six weeks. No ‘phones. Letters too slow. Responsibilities only for herself. Such decadent irresponsibility.
Of course the internet and all it’s associated appendages are an advantage, a great support vehicle. I wouldn’t have the fun of producing these missives, of publishing photos, of gleaning some information on what to expect further up the road, or of that recommendation for tonight’s parilla. It’s just how remarkable a morning can evaporate, how much battery power can disappear in the exercise. For stolen Wi-Fi never comes with a power point.
We are still grateful to the unsavvy or the plain philanthropic who wittingly or unwittingly allow us to plunder their connections.