Back in the wars between the cousins Red and White, Richard III purportedly cried, ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,’ as in the middle of battle, his barons deserted him for Henry Tudor and his horse was cut down under him.
You will note in the last sentence the word, horse, was repeated four times. For that is how important the animal was to the past, eventually declining in the First World World l914 from being a war horse that charged the enemy as part of a cavalry regiment to a decorative beast capable of dancing round an arena to music. Will anything else be as wondrous as the horse? As the vehicle on which life revolved it lasted thousands of years.
So why this musing in praise of a horse! Am I now going to extol the virtues of a car or a plane?
No, I am about to focus the remaining words of this blog on the humble existence of a small piece of wire. Not any piece of wire … a long, thin piece with a plug on one end, without which civilization as we know today would fail and come crashing down … the humble charger.
On the train yesterday, a young woman before disposing of her luggage whipped out this mandatory ‘piece of wire’searching for a socket, and changed her seat three times before she found a functioning unit. (She had mistakenly entered the quiet carriage).
Buses, trains, anything that moves, now feel obliged to offer both charging and YiFi points … and I ask, does the success of business now depend on this?
Waiting for the train at wondrously rebuilt Birmingham New Street Station, about which I will blog another time, the platform is awash with stylish fingers skimming over keyboards and loud-voiced conversations in which the intimate details of Aunty Minnie’s sex life are shouted into a mobile to, presumably, some interested party at the other end. Business deals worth millions of dollars are touted on that same platform while I, spoilsport that I am stand in my little bubble of silence … and think longingly of … er … I guess, silence.
And all of this is down to a single piece of wire.
If Shakespeare were alive right now, he would adroitly alter a those words of Richard III to: A charger, a charger, my kingdom for a charger.