Comp. 3417 invited you to write an elegy to a piece of obsolete technology. This prompted a deluge of very good entries – too many to name all the runners up, though here are some of the lamented objects: mangles, steam engines, oil lamps, floppy discs, the trebuchet, cash registers, radiograms, gramophones, tape recorders, Ceefax, Betamax, proper cameras, the fish slice, the pipe knife and – most of all – the VHS and the typewriter. A special mention to Tom Adam’s relatable paean to the Nokia:
I mourn that lump of plastic and its tiny little screen,
With only ‘Snake’ to offer up a hit of dopamine.
And Simon Godziek’s to the dial phone:
Yes, you could receive and, yes, you could call
But when all’s said and done, that’s about all.
Thanks for all your entries, and the winners of the £25 vouchers are below.
Millions on millions of primitive fax machines
Nestle in landfills that widen and wax.
Modems outmoded, with twentieth-century
Landlines, they lie in the land and relax,
No longer prompted to intercommunicate,
Severed forever from telephone jacks,
Nevermore straining with antediluvian
Screeches and buzzes and clickety-clacks.
Yesteryear’s masters of bitmap-transmittable
Missives have bitten the dustheap. Let cracks
Form on their carcasses post-existentially;
Placidly rusting, they’re resting in pax.
Telefacsimile documentarians
One day will dutifully dig up the facts;
Unmetaphorically, archaeological
Fieldworkers might even dig up the fax.
Alex Steelsmith
Nay, do not say you flattered to deceive,
Fulfilment of a long-awaited dream,
Impossible, at first sight, to believe,
The realisation of a love supreme.
You turned a home into a cinema
And me into a couch-potato fan
Who needn’t leave the house to go as far
As the fleapit or the Everyman.
But sadly, though you bested Betamax,
You had your flaws: the awkwardness of tapes
And all that fiddling with a ballpoint pen.
I loved you then, but love must face the facts
Technology, like feelings, takes new shapes.
I never said I’d never love again.
Basil Ransome-Davies
Yet once more, O ye writers, and once more
pray weep with me, your tears and sorrow lend,
for we’ve been robbed of that we knew before,
the tuneful typewriter, the scribe’s best friend.
The rattle of the cartridge’s return,
harmonious clicking of the keys when pressed
created melodies – and now I yearn
to hear those sounds that linger in my breast.
Those inadvertent errors that we shared:
an ‘o’, ink-flooding, formed a solid sphere,
an ‘i’ might lack a dot, perchance – who cared?
A minor fault was neither here nor there.
Yet now a silent keyboard is the norm,
correcting on-screen grammar, spelling too.
Ah me! I mourn what’s lost, I’ll not conform,
I’ve no desire to visit pastures new.
Sylvia Fairley
Who recalls the humble pager
whose ambition was to hide –
pocket, backpack, desktop, handbag –
anywhere but at your side?
Sometimes dubbed a beeper/bleeper
after its annoying noise.
All it did was squawk, its few words
never one of life’s great joys.
No one loved this little workhorse
with its unromantic ways,
just designed for interrupting
private plans for lazy days.
Mobile phones brought colour, glamour;
pagers were plain black and white.
Rest in peace now, little warrior,
in the has-been’s long goodnight.
D.A. Prince
You played us in at different speeds –
Sixteen, ponderous, all spoken,
Testaments, perhaps, or creeds:
Black, shellac, and quickly broken.
Ditto for the seventy-eight,
The stylus racing to your spindle.
How fragile, though your weight was great!
Memories of you that never dwindle –
Elizabethan! Bush! Dansette!
You made us shimmy, come alive,
Lifting your lids, red leatherette.
Thirty-three and forty-five –
Cilla, Dusty; Beatles, Stones:
We loaded up your auto-changer
And stirred up all our pheromones.
Be vintage. Don’t become a stranger!
Bill Greenwell
White noise and a dementing dance of dots,
That’s all there’s left of analogue TV.
I’ve still a set and switch her on and off,
Not out of hope but just, you know, to see.
Her many programmes used to keep me glued,
Now digitised, they’re all gone from the screen.
I’ve kept her licence here, though unrenewed,
In daft salute to what it used to mean.
Blank ‘snow’ fills every channel, every day,
My mind, too, has grown blizzardy with age,
Conflating low-watt stars her cathode ray
Made household Gods with every new catchphrase.
Hard to switch off while there’s still something on.
Her screen aglow, can she be obsolete?
It makes no odds vertical hold has gone,
And horizontal; life’s chaos on repeat.
Adrian Fry
No. 3420: Virtue signalling
‘The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.’ You are invited to submit a poem or short story incorporating this sentence (150 words/16 lines maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by 1 October.
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