‘Good thanks, though your mother’s driving me mad.’
‘Oh – bit too cooped up, eh?’
Dad lowers his voice to a whisper. ‘There’s no getting away from her at the moment, son.’
‘Well no, we are in the middle of a lockdown.’
‘I know but she seems to be everywhere. Just when I think I’m going to have a sit-down and watch a bit of the match, she’s got the next thing on her to-do list for me to get stuck into.’
‘I thought there wasn’t any sport on at the moment.’
‘There isn’t. These are old ones I’ve recorded.’ My dad is a complete sports nut; he loves watching football. My mum had satellite television installed a while ago, as she’s really into languages, but my dad had it permanently tuned into sport. Now he can watch football matches live every day of the week, all over the world. Except not at the moment of course as we’re in lockdown. As you can imagine the switch-off of sport is a bit of a result for Mum, so she is making the most of it.
‘Anyway, are you busy?’ Dad asks.
‘No, although I was just about to …’ I gesture aimlessly to the door, which is pointless as my dad is hardly going to see me.
‘Good – of course you can’t be, can you, stuck in all day?’
‘No, but I was just waiting for …’
‘It’ll only take a couple of minutes. I wondered if you could talk me through this email I tried to send.’
That’s the thing with this lockdown. If only we had had suitable warning, we could have all taken some time to enrol our boomer parents on a social media course at the local library, or given them a crash course ourselves, so that they were ready for this from a technical point of view. As it is, they are trapped in a world where their only means of seeing us is through technology they have little or no knowledge of. Trying to help them involves attempting to explain over the phone, which is about as easy as a game of Twister in the dark with directions given in Morse code, without any instructions for how to work or understand Morse code, or Twister either for that matter.
‘It’s difficult to tell you without seeing it, Dad,’ I explain gently.
‘The thing is, I sent an email to your mother’s Italian teacher – and it took her ages to write it as well, because it was partly in Italian.’ Oh no, this just gets worse. ‘I wrote it all out for her, not the Italian, she managed to type that in, although it kept autocorrecting the Italian words to English.’
‘I suppose it would,’ I say, then add without thinking: ‘You need to change the settings to autocorrect Italian … but then it would struggle and keep autocorrecting the English.’
‘How do I do that?’ asks Dad enthusiastically. ‘I’m sure I can give it a go.’
‘I think we’d better leave that for now,’ I say hastily, ‘and have a try at that when you’re more advanced. First of all, where’s the email?’
‘I sent it.’
‘Well that’s what you wanted, isn’t it?’
‘No, not really because there’s now an email saying “message undeliverable”.’
‘Oh, so it hasn’t gone.’
‘No presumably not.’ I can hear a whole lot of talking in the background – my mum is obviously really stressed out about the whereabouts of her email.
‘I think it would be best if you write it again,’ I start.
‘Sorry, your mother’s talking at the same time. I can’t hear you.
‘Can you write it again dear?’ I hear my mum getting agitated now. ‘Your mother spent hours writing that email,’ Dad adds gloomily.
‘We’ll find it. I know, I’ll FaceTime you.’
‘How do you do that?’
I count to ten before I reply. ‘We’ve done it before. Put the phone down and pick up when I call you on the FaceTime App.’
He does actually manage to accept the call, but all I can see is their kitchen ceiling. It’s strangely nostalgic, seeing the yellow swirly plaster and a homely looking little cobweb in the corner, along with the resident spider my dad calls Horace.
‘Hi, Dad?’
‘I can hear you but I can’t see you,’ he says.
‘Yeah that’s because the phone’s pointed at the ceiling. I can see Horace but not you.’
‘No that isn’t Horace, he left; felt a need for further social distancing. This is his son Harry.’
‘Oh right.’ I can’t believe we are discussing the spiders who live on