All I want for Christmas is a City time machine

Are smartphones fuelling a pandemic of youthful anxiety and depression? That’s the question parents will wrestle with this Christmas as their offspring clamour for the latest Samsung or Huawei. And the answer seems to be yes: these must-have accessories are corroding the nature of human interaction for the next generation — but the young can’t live without them, so we’d better get used to it. And that gives rise to an even trickier yuletide dilemma: what of the previous generation? Is there a digital device that’s safe to pop under the tree for an elderly relative?

The solution, I suggest, is the iPad. Not the iPad Pro — with more power than anyone who’s not a Hollywood film editor and part-time nuclear physicist could possibly need — but the basic £300 model that techies will tell you passed its sales peak five years ago, swept aside by the smartphone surge. Yesterday’s fashion it may be, but it’s also a timeless example of its maker Apple’s philosophy of simplified, intuitive design.

Last Christmas I gave one to my 90-year-old mother. With a certain amount of human assistance, it’s now her constant friend for email, family photographs, online shopping, crossword clues and most successfully, talking books. In that respect it’s the very opposite of the satanic, soul-eating gadget in the teenage hand: what could be more uplifting, when your eyesight has faded, than a time machine the size of a table mat that transports you back to the worlds of Trollope, Galsworthy and Somerset Maugham?

Lost City?

In 2018 I have found myself writing less about the City of London, giving space instead to the carmakers, coffee-shop chains, infrastructure cock-ups and maverick entrepreneurs that provided more colourful parables. Not that financial markets lacked entertainment value, whether I was laughing at bitcoin or counting the profits of ‘Faangs to Banngs’ — the winning switch from over-valued US internet stocks to undervalued gold miners suggested here in September by our veteran investor Robin Andrews.