A couple of Sundays ago, the self-proclaimed long-suffering spouse and I took our three-year-old grandson to the beach. The general idea was to encourage the little lad (who, while lively, is not naturally adventurous) to get up-close and personal with the gritty stuff and then introduce him to the delirious delights of frolicking in the waves. Nana even donned a dubious pair of technicoloured boardshorts for the occasion and Buppy sported a super-sized sunhat - perhaps by way of disguise, given my apparel, although I was not silly enough to go there.
The car-trip to the beach was uneventful; Sammy is a good traveller who derives immense satisfaction from pointing out all the wheeled objects en route, so there was plenty to please him along the way. And last but not least, we had cleverly orchestrated an early departure as Sammy is not a lover of crowds, his preference tending towards all things mechanical.
So there we were: sunhats, sunglasses and sunscreen - check. Excavation equipment - check. Beach-towels and bathers - check. Juice and jellybeans - check. In short, we felt we'd covered all our bases for a successful expedition and allowed ourselves a small, smug smirk apiece as we prepared to emerge from the seclusion of our chariot.
It was about then that we noticed the buses. Battalions of buses. If one bus can carry 60 passengers, then multiply that by.... Let's just say that there were a lot more bodies on that beach than we had bargained for. Now I consider myself a reasonably sociable being and indeed had to endure recurring complaints throughout my school career about what my teachers dubbed 'a tendency to talkativeness' but which I regarded as practising my talent for verbal communication. One should not wilfully neglect one's talents, particularly when one has very few. But I will freely confess that I have never understood what compels so many supposedly-sane people to pay the equivalent of the GDP of an emerging economy for the privilege of lining up, side-by-side like sardines squashed in a tiny tin, alongside a ridiculously-large percentage of the world's population on any beach, especially one on the French Riviera among the fab and famous. However, I am also aware that I am considered peculiar by numerous folk, including several of my nearest and dearest, so I am willing to forgo the point. In any event, this outing was designed to be an adventure so we bravely girded up our collective loins and ventured forth, Sammy wisely wearing his sunglasses as a protective barrier between him and the crowds. We found a small patch of unclaimed sand and boldly annexed it; having a toddler on our team proved to be an unexpected asset when it came to repelling would-be encroachers - particularly when he embarked on an energetic excavation programme. And so we sat, a slightly-more-than-middle-aged couple and a toddler, marooned in the midst of a seething mass of teenagers, each equipped with what appeared to be the latest thing in digital devices. Fortunately, Sammy seemed set to dig Down Under, so I was free to give my fascination full reign and stare in a manner that would have earned me a robust rebuke from my mother.
I do not live under a toadstool. Indeed, I am semi-gainfully employed at an all-girls' high school and so am fully cognizant of the modern obsession with social media in general and the phenomenon known as the 'selfie' in particular. I have even been known to take (and inflict on my cyber-friends) a 'selfie' - regrettably not with President Obama or even Prince Wills but with the express purpose of publicly humiliating myself for a good cause. It seemed like a good thing to do at the time. So I do, to some extent, 'get' the whole cyber-graffiti thing - a kind of pictorial 'Kilroy was here'. And anyway, humanity has been busily documenting itself and its antics for millennia, from the earliest stick-art of the cave-dwellers to the elaborate portraits of the Renaissance and on into the digital age. Of course, there is nothing wrong with recording memories, be they verbal or visual, but what struck me about the techno-throngs at the beach that morning was that they were more interested in their 'selfies' than in their surroundings. There they were, on a beautiful stretch of beach, with the sunlight sparkling on the waves and a cloudless sky of breathless blue above their heads and all they saw (through the lens of their smartphone cameras) were close-ups of their own and their friends' faces, contorted into a variety of grins and grimaces. If it wasn't for the location app on their devices, they could just as well have been at home or at the local shopping centre. They were not immortalizing memories of an expedition or an experience but simply recording themselves... which I confess I found vaguely disturbing.
Rene Descartes famously argued: 'I think, therefore I am'. Whatever one's personal view of that as a philosophical proposition, we should surely guard against adopting as our existential truth: 'I 'selfie', therefore I am'.
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