Three minutes of the Condor

How hard is it to give up smartphones?

One of my early memories of my Scottish grandmother, back when I was a nipper, was her Bakelite telephone. It was a huge affair, sturdy, matt black, and had a built-in drawer underneath the dial, containing a directory in which one could note important telephone numbers. Its dark, mottled, intertwined cord would not stretch like that attached to our telephone at home. It was antediluvian and ponderous and required arm muscles, especially if the conversation was a lengthy one. I don’t know how long my Gran had had this particular instrument when I first became aware of it, but I now know it hadn’t been all that long: she didn’t have it the day my grandfather died, in 1957.

Until that day, both my grandmother and my grandfather had existed in this world without being subscribers to the telephone service. They were both born in 1888, which was just 14 years after the telephone’s invention by Alexander Graham Bell. They sent telegrams when urgent communication was needed, and they wrote letters to their friends and family. That was how they stayed in touch, and they were close-knit, to my Gran’s family especially, right to the very end.

When Gran died in 1974, it started with a fall in the night whilst she was living at our home. She was whisked to hospital where the broken leg was treated using traction. The bandages around her leg got horribly diseased, for she had had a history of leg ulcers, and eventually her leg needed to be amputated below the knee. She passed away some days later and, in the half-conscious wooziness in which she then was enveloped (owing to the pain-relieving drugs that were administered to her), she asked after her pre-deceased sisters, in a voice that suggested she had been transported back to halcyon days of childhood. The bonds of love, of sisterhood and brotherhood, that existed in her family had established themselves through their personal relations, and had not in any way been helped or promoted through telecommunications: quite simply, there were none. On reflection, I think she probably still died in some physical pain, but with her head replete with happy memories. However, in 1957, at the age of 68, my Gran had become a subscriber to the General Post Office’s Telephones and Telegraph service for the first time in her life.

On my grandfather’s 69th birthday, he had had some family and friends over for a small celebration, after which he and my Gran retired to bed. In the night, he felt unwell and complained of pain in his head. He was having a cerebral haemorrhage. Gran was beside herself with worry and didn’t know what to do, since they didn’t have a phone. They were on very friendly terms with their neighbours and, across the landing from their own flat, there lived Mrs McLean, who would let them use her telephone when that was needed. Gran sat and fretted: it was the middle of the longest night she ever knew, for she simply couldn’t disturb Mrs McLean at that hour. She waited, frantically patient, until the clock slowly ticked around to 6 o’clock, and then she made her move across the landing. Mrs McLean, of course, called a doctor immediately, but it was too late. My grandfather had already passed away, six weeks before the birth of his second grandson. It was shortly after that that, at my own mother’s insistence, the GPO installed a telephone in my Gran’s flat.

My mother wailed in anguish: if it had been her husband lying prostrate in his bed in pain, she would have been out on the landing crying blue murder for someone to send an ambulance, instead of coyly waiting until a decent hour had arrived. In that she was a very practical woman. And she perhaps overlooked the fact that her own mother and, indeed, some of her aunts had worked their lives long in service; one had even been housekeeper to the Earl of Lichfield. There was something of Ishiguro’s Mr Stevens in my Gran.

What persuaded her to acquiesce in subscribing to the telephone service was not the need for a telephone, but its desirability. It was desirable, as her own husband’s death had shown, as a means to summon help when help was needed. Of course, Gran used the new telephone to call her sons and daughter and other family members, and they phoned her. She phoned her grocery orders down to Jimmy Brown on Old Dumbarton Road, and Jimmy would send the message boy to her with the things she’d asked for, so it was very practical. But it was not, to my Gran’s mind, necessary.

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Three Days of the Condor is a 1975 movie starring Robert Redford and Faye Dunaway, based on the book Six Days of the Condor by James Grady. Redford plays a CIA operative named Joe Turner (Ronald Malcolm in the book) working at a clandestine “import/export” office in downtown New York, whose main function is to analyse the plots of books to determine whether they might shed light on subterfuge that foreign powers might be indulging in, or to provide ideas for subterfuge that the U.S. itself might indulge in.

On day one of the saga, Turner nips out to pick up everyone’s lunch from a café a few blocks distant. Because it is pouring rain, he opts to go out via a rear window into a courtyard and then to the street, thus saving him getting too wet. Whilst he is away, assassins enter the office and shoot everyone dead, and they assume that Turner is one of them, since they saw him arrive, but not leave. Turner discovers the massacre upon his return. Initially shocked, he gathers his thoughts and leaves the scene of the bloodbath. His next move is obviously a memory item for him as a CIA operative (code name Condor, of course): he calls an operations desk on a public telephone, explains his predicament, and asks to be brought in.

As the plot progresses, it becomes apparent that there is a traitor in the CIA, who tries to kill Turner at a pre-arranged rendezvous. Pre-arranged, that is, by telephone. At several points, Turner objects, when he’s told the procedure to follow, that he doesn’t know who the people are that he’s talking to. How can he trust them? Late in the film he makes another call to his superior after purloining a bag of work tools from a telephone repair team working on cables in the street. He makes his call to Cliff Robertson from a telephone exchange, to which he gains access simply by walking in with the tool bag. The CIA of course trace the call to find out where Turner is, and Turner has been clever enough to rig his call up so that it traces back to no fewer than 50 locations in the city, which earns him Robertson’s epithet “son of a—” female dog.

The contract killer who assassinated his office colleagues (Max von Sydow) is on Turner’s tail and is better at finding him than the CIA are: because he notes the registration number of a car that Redford is driving, which belongs to the woman (Dunaway) he has kidnapped in his search for a temporary refuge. As the assassin’s binoculars focus on the orange tag of the Ford Bronco, the audience gets its first real shock: he has means of finding out where the owner of the car lives, and yet he’s not the police!

The movie is entertaining, thrilling and well acted. But it’s a technological dinosaur. Redford’s job would nowadays be being done by AI. There’s no way he could just walk into a Bell telephone exchange; for a start, there’s no such thing as a Bell telephone exchange in these times. Tracing the Ford’s tag plate would be way unnecessary nowadays: cameras and satellites would find him almost instantly, as would the signal from his mobile phone, because public phones just don’t exist now, either. In 1975 you could make a credible film about the CIA in which a fugitive can evade detection in the heart of the city of New York for three days. Fifty years later, he wouldn’t have survived for three minutes.

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So, who doesn’t have a mobile phone? I remember getting my first one and having a business contact phone me as I walked along the street. It was a surreal feeling, a bit like the first time you wear a Walkman in public. I was able to talk to him whilst doing some shopping. And he could reach me whilst I was doing the shopping. That second part quickly became a nuisance: you had to remember to switch the thing off in places where you didn’t want to be disturbed. But the crux of the matter as far as Three Days of the Condor and such like are concerned is that, as long as it was on, you could be traced. The evidence in the prosecution of the 2016 terrorists who bombed Brussels airport and shot up a pizzeria in Vorst included signals recorded by GSM towers as the suspects had moved through the city to their various meetings and rendezvous. Now, these records would be backed up by ample images from the many cameras that have burgeoned in our modern cities.

Soon after the introduction of the mobile phone, it was announced that our motorways would no longer be served by emergency telephones. If you had a breakdown on a motorway, you would need to telephone for a breakdown wagon on your mobile phone, and that was no great problem, because everyone has one. But you really don’t even need a mobile phone on today’s motorways: there are so many cameras that you’d soon be noticed and ‘ere too long, a patrol would come to find out what you’re up to. Or broken down to, as it were.

Even if you do have a mobile, not everyone’s mobile phone has full power. And not everyone breaks down in a place with proper reception of signals. But, then again, not every emergency telephone alongside a motorway worked. When my engine blew up at Ecclefechan on the A74(M) in the 1980s, I trudged to a farm house to use the telephone to call the breakdown service, because I wasn’t a member of the Automobile Association, beside whose box I had come to a halt. But neither I nor my aunt who was with me were dying and, although we had a long journey still to do, we were philosophical about the circumstances that had caused the delay.

I don’t actually have a mobile telephone right now. My old one packed in when it got wet, and I haven’t replaced it, instead relying on the fixed-line telephone. I have a number of reasons:

• Unsurprisingly, the fixed line never goes anywhere. I have an extension in my bedroom, and when the phone rings, the extension also rings. If it rings and I’m in the garden, I hear it and come into the house to answer it. If it rings off before I can reach the instrument, and the call is important, they will ring back. If they don’t, it wasn’t important. All these things sound normal to someone living in 1975. But to you, they likely sound revolutionary.

  Once when I was a teenager, my parents had been away in London, and were on their way home. I took the opportunity of my freedom to listen to pop music, and did so using earphones, so that I did not hear the telephone ringing. Presently, I did hear the doorbell. When I heard that, I found two police officers on the doorstep with an urgent message: my paternal grandmother was at death’s door. It’s a bizarre mirror of the death of my maternal grandfather: instead of not having the phone and waiting, the phone rang and didn’t get answered. It had been important, so the message was passed to me in another manner.

• People tell me that clients won’t call a fixed-line telephone number. They will only call a mobile number. I don’t believe that my potential clients are that witless, and if they are, maybe it’s better they go to someone else.

• Whether it’s just my ISP (Internet service provider) I don’t know, but the mobile always rang six times and then stopped. So, if I was in the garden and the phone was in the house and I realised it was ringing upon the third ring, I knew I couldn’t reach it in time and would need to call back. But, after it stopped ringing, I first needed to locate it. Many calls to my phone were made by me, in order to find out where the blazes it was. A mobile phone is only mobile when you are mobile. When you’re at home, it becomes a burden, as you need to remember to always have it with you when you go to the kitchen, the garage, and the toilet. After all, it’s when you’re in those places that it rings, or so it seems.

• I once learned that, when someone gives you their mobile phone number in order to send them text messages, you may not use it to telephone them. You must first write to them to ask whether you may telephone them. It is called a telephone number, but it is not for telephoning. It is for texting.

• Some texting services are nosy. WhatsApp particularly. It listens to your calls and it reads your text messages. The encryption it boasts of, if it really exists, prevents other people from listening and reading, but it doesn’t prevent the service provider itself. I spoke recently on this portal in a passing reference, to GAIA, a Belgian animal rights organisation; it wasn’t even in an e-mail or text message. Yesterday, I received a beautiful 2026 calendar from them, with a request to pay for it. What a coincidence. When I mentioned it to my techie housemate (he does monowheels, Apple watches, heat-sensitive cameras (just for the heck of it!) and those goggles where you go off into another world) he said, They need their money as well.

Everybody knows the saying If it’s free, you are the product, and, if I pay for this calendar, I suppose I am the product because it’s not free. Go figure. But it’s surprising how few people take that to heart. But, then again, what is there to take to heart? Yes, we are tracked and traced, and we are sent advertisements, and WhatsApp isn’t private, and Facebook is a con, and Amazon is evil and, and, and, but we simply could not exist without smartphones. Could we? Well, did you try it? Did you try to live without a smartphone? Not like my Gran and Grandpa back in the 1900s, without a phone at all. But without a smartphone. Did you?

One of the Nobel prizewinners this year could not at first be told of the fact he had won. He was on a digital detox, unable to be reached by telephone. Of course, when they finally brought him the news, he was pleased. Because it was good news. But you don’t do a detox until you’re filled to the gills with poison, or do you?

Well, if you are still swithering about whether you can or can’t exist without a mobile phone in 2025, I have an answer for you: you can’t. At least I can’t. Not and still run a car. And you may be wondering what a mobile phone has to do with owning a car, so let me tell you. But first, owning an Apple.

I was notified by Apple to verify my two-factor authentication: clearly, routine checks were revealing that my phone number was no longer active. So, after a few clicks, I entered my land line as a new number and they confirmed it by calling me and, with an automated voice, reading to me the confirmation code I needed to enter into the online application. It was quickly done, and just as quickly I discovered that you don’t need a mobile phone to be an Apple subscriber, which kind-of surprised me. A nice surprise.

However, my car needs to go for a technical check, to see that everything’s in order. I always get my mechanic to do that for me, because if anything needs doing, it’s good if the car can be worked on immediately. The online booking service to get an appointment asks for my car registration number and the last part of the chassis number. I select the station I want to have the inspection done at, the date and the time. Then I need to enter my address and phone number. These are just as a precaution, it says. I suppose, in case they need to inform me … I dunno, that the inspection station has been hit by lightning and gone up in smoke, or that there’s a strike, or that the country’s been invaded by Russia, or something like that. But it can’t be a land line. It needs to be a mobile phone number.

Well, I thought, if Jean-Michel is going to be taking the car for its inspection, then I’ll enter his phone number. That’s best. No, it turns out that is not best, because they have now sent a confirmation code to that number, and it needs to be entered into their system before the appointment can be confirmed. A confirmation code for details just in case.

As I was running around in that circle, a friend e-mailed me to express sorrow that I no longer have a mobile phone, because she cannot speak a message into WhatsApp and send it to me using that service any more. If she’s reading this, I really mean nothing by what I’m going to say in response to that. Be assured that our friendship is as solid as it has always been, but I’d like to point out this: that spoken messages can quite easily still be sent to me, even without a mobile phone: it’s called a phone … call …

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This topic came up in a recent comment on another blogger’s website, where a lady said she sympathised and also wanted to do away with her mobile phone but, like Saint Augustine … not yet.

(St. Augustine (354–430) considered himself profligate in his youth, much to the distress of his mother, Monica. In his Confessions, which recount some of this early history, he is famous for having written what is often repeated as: “Please, God, make me good; but not just yet.”)

It made me smile, and it made me reply to her in these somewhat more sombre terms: Like diets, huh? I used to know a South American who took drugs intravenously. I said to him once, “There will be a day when you take your last slam, won’t there?” He agreed, there would. I said, “Will it be you that decides when that day comes, or the slam?”

Two years ago, I gave up smoking, from one day to the next. A tiny bit of Oh, I could fancy a cigarette now, but no great withdrawal symptoms. I was surprised and happy, even if I put on weight. My doctor had tapped a few details into his computer and told me that I have a 12 per cent chance of having a cardiac arrest, and smoking wasn’t helping. I said, “That small a chance?” He was serious, but not grave: Mr Vincent, that’s quite a high probability, actually. He went on: Are you interested in giving up smoking? He is Italian, young, knowledgeable, personable, and he isn’t pushy, not yet. Maybe later in his career, but right now he’s … a friend. I replied that I wasn’t, but his question echoed in my mind: what a strange way to put it—am I interested?

Of course, in one sense, I was interested, in that I clearly had an interest. But, was I interested in the sense of wanting it? Are you interested and Do you want are semantically the same question, but in subtle ways they come over to the recipient very differently. He recommended a heart examination by echography, a cardio cycling test, radiography and a strange machine that whizzes around you and injects strange liquids into you. I’m a wimp, and came out of that machine a physical wreck. I found it terrifying. There had been a woman in the waiting room who conducted a telephone call on her mobile in a loud voice on speaker. I found it very disturbing and that’s perhaps why I was so discombobulated by the machine.

The consultant read off my results and declared that my heart is in an excellent state of health. But I still gave up smoking: I never again wanted to go into that spinning thing. The thing with giving up a habit like smoking (or, I imagine, giving up other addictive habits) is that, once you give up one habit, you find it really quite easy to give up another. Instead of compensating by binging on another sinful habit, giving up one helps you give up another. Successful dieters know this. Perhaps one habit abandoned gives you confidence to abandon another. Confidence that Saint Augustine didn’t have.

All that’s very well, of course. My Gran and Grandpa didn’t need to have a telephone because their world was organised in such a way that it didn’t demand that they have one. But you can summon all the willpower you want: if the world is set up in such a way as to oblige you to acquire a habit, then what is willpower even worth? And that applies whether it’s Coke or cocaine, or intravenous drugs or mobile phones. We know for a fact that the mobile phone is bad for us. We retort that a bit of Facebook is harmless, as if a bit of crystallised methamphetamine would be harmless. Have you tried meth? Why not? Just one snort, a bit of crystal, would surely be harmless? Or a bit of spice, or one cigarette or, dare I say it, one glass of wine. They’re all harmful, and saying no to one makes it easier to say no to another. Since I stopped smoking, I’ve also given up alcohol. And now I gave up smartphones. And just like when I stopped smoking, I somehow feel I can breathe more easily.

Some people even maintain that mobile phones radiate signals that are deleterious to our health. And yet we persist, because we are simply hooked, even if we deny it. But, then, all addicts deny their addictions, don’t they?

Even after the scandal with The Atlantic, I see reports that Mr Hegseth, the U.S. Secretary for War, still uses the Signal app, for which there’s only one explanation, in my view: he doesn’t want his messages to be scrutinised by future U.S. governments, even if they get scrutinised by current foreign ones.