Dumber than the moth

Who knew taking a selfie was a full time job?

I have just returned from a rather relaxing summer holiday. It was a very pleasant week away with little more to do than to eat, drink, swim, and wander around pointing at random things. When you wind down properly you find yourself with time to do some rather weird stuff, such as giving names to things that you never would at home.

We named all sorts of creatures during our week in Cyprus. A moth living by our hotel lift was called ‘Digby’ (due in no small part to it being the biggest moth in the world, bearing a striking similarity in both size and shape to an RAF Avro Vulcan bomber). A lizard we encountered was named ‘Eddie’ (think about it, it’s a bit of a groaner but you will get there in the end!). We called a large black and grey crow-like bird that visited daily to drink from the pool ‘Jeremy’ for no logical reason whatsoever, and we made friends with plenty of cats and kittens, all of whom were christened for the week.

But it wasn’t just dumb animals that we were on first name terms with. We also renamed a couple of families that we shared the hotel with. I can’t be sure exactly where they came from, but an educated guess would be that they travelled from somewhere deep within the former Eastern bloc, since they had an accent that I have only heard before from a nine fingered chap waiting in a Portakabin for Jack Reacher. The men were clearly terrorists, KGB or contract killers. They were six feet tall, bronzed, chiselled and muscled, with goatees and hair darker than Frankie Boyle’s material, and more tattoos than the entire Chapel Stand of St Mary’s Stadium combined. Now it would have been easy to name them Alexi and Vladimir, but conscious of the need to avoid unnecessary racist stereotyping we called them Clive and Rupert.

But we weren’t aware of the men at first; it was their wives that initially drew our attention. One was dark haired and had apparently made the foolish mistake of coming on holiday without a swimming costume. However she had averted this crisis by cleverly fashioning one from three postage stamps and a piece of string. Her friend was blonde and flounced about in a bikini that made the stamp/string affair look like a duffle coat. Again, it was incredibly tempting to call them Katarina and Olga, but we went with the less controversial Agatha and Doris. We will return to them later...

Before we do though, I should share an epiphany that I experienced whilst taking a daily walk to and from the local harbour. I am aware that the youth of today (and yes - I am well aware how old that makes me sound) and young women in particular, like to look their best in a photograph. But I wasn’t aware of exactly how much of a complicated process was involved. The sea front was the perfect place for that fantastic profile pic, and we saw people taking them. A lot of people. You literally couldn’t make that walk without falling over dozens of them.

When I take a selfie, I take my phone out, turn on the camera, gurn at it briefly and press the shutter button. Job done. If I want to really look my best I might swiftly run my hand through where my hair used to be.

Apparently I have been doing it wrong all these years. The correct process is FAR more involved. We repeatedly saw people (and let’s not mince words, it was virtually all young women) strike a pose, fiddle with their hair, pose again, move a faction because the sun was in their eyes or a dog was pissing on them, move a fraction more, and so on, ad infinitum. In some cases this went on for ten or twenty minutes. Now I understand that we all want to look our best in a photo, but equally you are who you are. You can take all the time in the world but you look like what you look like. As my sound engineer used to constantly remind me when I played in a band, you can’t polish a turd. Or maybe now, with all the clever camera apps and filters available, you can, which means you don’t need to be dicking about for twenty minutes or more trying to get one perfect bloody photo.

And we need to pause for a moment and examine the ‘pose’, because it is appears to be completely uniform. Chest out. One leg bent. Arse out. Head back. Trout pout. The only problem is that this is a pose used by supermodels. And they can get away with it, because, well - they are supermodels. If you aren’t, it comes across (to a dumb old bloke like me anyway) as somewhat false and faintly ridiculous.

And while we are on the subject, who told women that the trout-pout was attractive anyway? It so isn’t. To this fifty-something dinosaur at least, a natural pose and a genuine smile is a million times more attractive. But to be fair they aren’t trying to attract geriatrics like me and maybe today’s young stud finds women that resemble a deformed Gourami deeply attractive. Who knows?

Anyway, let’s return to Agatha and Doris.

On the first morning by the pool, Doris had clearly decided that she wanted a poolside picture, and Agatha was recruited as a comrade in arms to help create that elusive shot. At this time Clive and Rupert were nowhere to be seen, presumably busy elsewhere fighting Liam Neeson, or chasing Bruce Willis on snowmobiles.

So Doris adopts the standard pose but turned up to 11. Her backside and chest are thrust out so far they are in different time zones. The fish lips in evidence were such that at one point a Norwegian trawler turned up in the deep end. This went on for some considerable time with Agatha gamely doing the David Bailey thing with her iPhone, with both of them completely oblivious to how absurd the whole pantomime was appearing to other hotel guests.

But even after twenty minutes of this, a satisfactory shot had not been obtained poolside, so they both decided to venture into the pool. Now this is where, in my mind, the faintly ridiculous turned into the completely absurd as, so far as I am aware, iPhones and swimming pools do not make great bed partners.

Cue another ten minutes of flouncy poses, hair wafting and pouting. And still the results were apparently unsatisfactory. So then, out came a selfie-stick.

At this point I had to hastily check the date on my phone as I was concerned that I had accidentally wandered through some kind of tear in the fabric of space/time and had been transported back to 2006. But no, it really was 2023. And we were treated to more posing. More photos. And still they couldn’t achieve the shot they wanted. So next (and I shit you not) they produced a full sized tripod. In a frikking swimming pool!

Now there was one outcome from this entire escapade, in that I conclusively proved to myself that I am not adorned in any way with the gift of telekinesis, because by God I was willing a stray football from the kids playing nearby to come clattering into the tripod and send the whole bloody lot to the bottom of the pool.

I came to the conclusion that presumably Doris makes some kind of income from Tik-Tok, Only Fans or similar. It would be hard to imagine that this amount of effort was just for her Facebook profile picture.

Eventually after an hour of dicking about, they were finally happy and returned to their sun beds, where they lay reviewing the results of their morning’s work on their phones.

At this point, a young lad aged about five approached Doris and it became clear it was her son. It wasn’t immediately obvious as he hadn’t been near her for the whole morning (he was probably hiding out of sheer embarrassment) but now he checked in with her, asking her for something, maybe a drink, something to eat, perhaps for her to play with him; I don’t really know as they were out of earshot and anyway I don’t speak KGB.

And she dismissed him without even looking up from her phone.

I felt sad for the lad. He was on holiday – he wanted some time with his mum and she simply wasn’t interested. Her photo shoot was clearly more important. And this attitude continued towards him throughout their holiday. He was expected to disappear and entertain himself all day every day while she flounced about with her phone. And Rupert? He was almost consistently conspicuous by his absence.

Now perhaps people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. Do I spend too long looking at my phone? Absolutely. Could I have been a better Dad for my kids? I’m sure I could have.

But I always tried to make time for them. In 2005 we had a holiday in Cornwall when my son was the same age as this lad and my daughter was a bit older. I have very happy memories of the time spent teaching them how to body-board in the surf at Porthtowan beach. Had I packed them off and spent most the week trying to take a photo of myself instead, I am sure my recollections of that holiday would not be so pleasant.

So is there a message here? Perhaps it is better to spend your time making memories, rather than photos. If a photo has to be staged so carefully, maybe it’s not a memory of anything at all. And our kids are more important than a billion photos.

Don’t be as dumb and selfish as Doris and Rupert...

AG 29/05/2023