The scene is a drawing-room at nightfall. A group of weekenders sit in time-honoured tradition around a crackling fire. One is engrossed in a magazine; another chats with her boyfriend; the rest debate whether the word ‘zapateado’ is permissible in their board game. But this is not a house party as Terence Rattigan knew it: the magazine is being read on an iPad; the lovers are exchanging endearments by text message; the game-players have swapped the Scrabble set for a laptop with access to Wordscrape. New technology is tightening its grip on our lives, and not even the country house weekend is immune.
The CHW was once a little pocket of days isolated from normality; a stage on which a hostess could play at being director, choosing an amusing cast of characters and watching them flirt and scrap. It wasn’t always a walk in the Humphrey Repton park. For every natural guest happy to bob along like Bertie Wooster on a current of chit chat there would be another — humiliated on the croquet lawn or peeved at not getting the best bedroom — whose weekend was given over to plotting revenge. But like it or not, everyone was in it together, and accepted the need to muck in.
Back then, a guest craving communication with the outside world was invariably dependent on his host’s good offices: one only has to think of the frustrated film producer in Gosford Park trying to take a call from America. Even when television found its way into the house it was rarely made available, except for crucial events such as the final Ashes test. The only ready source of news was the morning newspapers — chosen, of course, by the host.
Now such isolation — so essential to Agatha Christie’s plots — is a thing of the past. We have grown used to the freedom of the airwaves, and the chink of coins left apologetically by the telephone has been replaced by the regular buzz of BlackBerries announcing a gap-year email from Peru. A single lady left stranded by both neighbours at lunch no longer stares meaningfully at the salt cellar — she whips out her mobile and prods away.
It is a development that some deplore. How are we to forget the quotidian hurly-burly, they ask, when the chap on the window seat is checking share prices on his smartphone? An iPad propped against the marmalade pot signals fragmentation as well as liberation. Where once the Sunday Times was read by the entire party, and duly debated, today’s guests gravitate towards their favourite blogs: dinner disintegrates into a series of monologues explaining The Caucus’s view of US tax reform or Guido Fawkes’s take on ministerial haircuts. A walk, anyone? Only if the iPhone weather app gives the all-clear.
But change isn’t always for the worse. Thanks to the mobile and the microwave, guests delayed for two hours on the M3 need no longer arrive to find a dried-out dinner and frosty faces. GPS navigation has largely eliminated the need for complicated directions, and there’s more scope for covert flings now that texts can pave the way. (Choose your rendezvous on Google Earth.) The day may not be far off when house plans can be downloaded to facilitate corridor creeping. The hand-held ability to do quick research on fellow guests is a consummate gift for those who have a tendency to put their foot in it.
What else? Well, the advent of the Kindle has relieved the burden of choosing bedside reading for guests, and diminished the risk of books being borrowed and never returned. Wi-Fi spells an end to the unseemly competition among guests for the single ethernet connection in the morning room — though you may trip over them crouched in darkened corridors as they search for signal, or wandering like water-dowsers around the landing, holding handsets aloft. ‘It’s also much easier to nick other people’s staff,’ observes one canny guest. ‘We were staying with some friends who’d hired a very good cook, so I said “Give me your phone number” and booked her by text for the following week.’
There are still advances to be made. I have another friend who is looking forward to a placement app which will record who came to dinner, whom they sat next to, and what she wore. (Ideally, too, it will collate guests’ individual interests and generate the ideal table plan.)
But a few hosts remain who have set their faces against the new technology in an attempt to preserve the halcyon days of the Wi-Fi-free weekend. Access to the internet is denied; and texting is a cardinal sin, even for teenagers — who have been known to find to their surprise that racing demon is almost as exciting as Grand Theft Auto 4.