This morning, when I was supposed to be working on the novel, I called up the magic of google earth and keyed in, one by one, the far-flung places where half my family are at the moment.
My husband’s in Honiara. Nice alliteration there. Or perhaps the title of a silly love song. Or a ‘he done me wrong’ song. I type it in: HONIARA and hit the key and we whiz dizzyingly around to the top of Australia and then some.
Ah, so that’s where the Solomon Islands are. There are so many of them – strung out along the ocean between Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu. I click on images of Honiara and it looks very much like Port Vila the only time I’ve been to that part of the world, except more parochial and empty.
Older son. I know exactly where he is, but still I type it in and spin around the serene blue globe. Glasgow. If I want to take the time, I can home in on his street.
Younger son: Isle of Mull. Not so far from his brother. As far from me, both of them, as they can possibly be without leaving the planet.
I spoke to Hamish just last night. Got straight through to the remote little outpost of Mull where he is staying in old stone miners’ cottages, working for six months with kids from Glasgow. They even have internet access, I can skype him if I have the inclination.
I love this modern ability to communicate instantly across vast distances. I do. Although it doesn’t stop the longing to just have them there, solid and human and real, putting on the kettle as I arrive home from work of an evening. It doesn’t replace the spontaneous little comical interactions that happen in families at the oddest hours – late at night, early on dark winter mornings, when one of you really should get going but doesn’t want to end the conversation. It’s never the same as the warm presence of my husband on his side of the bed.
But I’m not complaining. My forbears lived with communication via sailing and then steamship; I grew up with slow letters traveling by train and then by plane, which still took a week or two, winging between my loved ones and me.
In the Narnia chronicles that I was raised on, there’s a scene in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that fired my juvenile imagination. On the island of the hilarious, bumbling, newly-visible dufflepuds, the magician gives our heroes, the intrepid but weary travellers, a gift. It’s a map of the known world, which they are sailing rapidly to the end of.
But it’s no ordinary map. Hold a magnifying glass to it, anywhere, the magician demonstrates, and suddenly, you zoom in on wherever it is, and can see miniature hills and valleys and streams, minute houses, tiny town squares and people going about their business. As a kid I longed for this map. Now I have it, at the touch of a button.
So much of the technology we have at our fingertips – literally – would have been considered sheer magic even ten years ago. The whole search engine thing is crazy when you stop to think about it. I can ask anything at all, and in a jiffy, I have the answer in front of me.
This is the kind of thing I used to fantasize about when I wanted to remember the lyrics to a favourite song. Even more, when I had seen a movie and couldn’t remember the last film I’d seen that actor in. These days, I type their name in and bingo, there’s the list.
Back to the spinning blue of google earth. One of the things I love about it is the sense of direction it gives me. As it takes me to the Solomon Islands, I am able to see exactly where they lie in relation to me.
Even more important, it gives a powerful sense of connectedness. Everything, even Glasgow, is just around the corner really. Just over an ocean and a desert and a continent or two and then you’re swooping down and there’s the street of your loved one. Like in a plane only a billion times less boring.
It’s the phrase ‘global village’ made manifest, or maybe made virtual, but whichever, it is here on my little computer screen on my desk in my study in my weatherboard house in West Brunswick, connecting me with the people I love, all around the world.