It was 11.48pm on a Saturday and I was sat on the edge of the bed in my reading glasses, holding my phone at arm’s length like it owed me money, staring at a small grey circle with an R in it. It had not moved for forty minutes. As far as I could tell it was sitting on top of a chicken shop on Narborough Road.
Priya was asleep. Or doing a very good impression of it, because at one point she said, without opening her eyes, “Put it down, Sanjay.”
I did not put it down.
Some background. Priya set up a family location sharing group when Anjali went off to Sheffield last autumn. It was, and I quote my wife, “for emergencies only”. It took me about six days to break that. I opened it on a Thursday evening to check Anjali was in the library, which is where she had told us she would be “basically living” in first year. She was not in the library. She was, according to the map, in a bowling alley on the other side of the city. I said nothing. I am still quite proud of that.
So that was the start of it. These days all five of us are on it, and I’m not completely sure how I feel about that, which is partly why I’m writing this.
Back to the chicken shop. I rang Rohan once. Straight to voicemail. I sent a text that said “All ok?” with a full stop on the end, and I have since been told by Kiran that a full stop from a parent reads as “I am about to come and find you”. Which, in fairness, I was considering. I had my shoes on. I had the car keys in the pocket of my dressing gown, which is not a look.
At 12.20 the front door went and in he came, perfectly cheerful, smelling of somebody else’s house. His phone had died at three per cent outside the chicken shop at about eleven, and the app had just kept showing the last place it knew about. He’d been at his friend Dev’s two streets away the whole time, eating toast and watching the football highlights.
Reader, I had been about to drive to a chicken shop in my slippers to rescue a phone.
That’s the thing nobody really tells you about these apps. A dot is a phone, not a child. It tells you where a bit of glass and battery was the last time it had signal. It doesn’t tell you whether they’re happy or frightened or bored stiff, or if they’ve eaten anything other than chips since lunch. I spend my working day at the pharmacy telling people that more information isn’t always more reassurance (usually people who have read the whole leaflet, including the very rare side effects, and now can’t sleep), and then I come home and do exactly the same thing with a map.
In my day (I know, I know) the system was a ten pence piece. You rang from the phone box when you got there, and you rang again if you were going to be late, and if you didn’t, my mum stood at the front window with the net curtain pulled back about an inch until you came round the corner. My dad would pretend he wasn’t worried and then “pop out for milk” at half eleven at night. We had milk. We always had milk. I think about that a lot now. They’d come from Kampala with very little and plenty of reasons to worry about the world, and all they had was a curtain and a pint of milk as an excuse. I’ve got satellites. And I’m still stood at the window, really.
Kiran was the one who pushed back. She’s fourteen, in Year 9, and has firm views on privacy that she has clearly picked up from somewhere other than me. When Priya suggested adding her, she said it was “giving prison”. I said, trying to be helpful, that it was more “giving safety guard”. I am reliably informed by both children that this is not how giving works. She then set out her terms like a union rep. If she shares hers, we share ours. Both of us. Always on.
Fair enough, we said. What harm could it do.
Within a week she had worked out that I stop at the garage on the way back from Oadby most evenings, and that this is where the sausage rolls come from. My GP would also like to know about the sausage rolls, as it happens, given my last cholesterol result. So I have been rumbled by a fourteen year old with a map, and honestly, I had it coming.
What we actually agreed
We sat down one Sunday after lunch and sorted it out properly. Nothing on the fridge, nothing signed. It’s for lifts, for lost phones, and for when somebody is properly late and not answering. It is not for “why were you at so and so’s?” Nobody comments on where anyone else has been. If anyone wants to stop sharing, they say so out loud instead of quietly switching it off, and nobody is allowed to sulk about it. (That last rule was mainly for me.) We just use what came built into the phones, by the way. You don’t need to pay for an app, whatever the adverts keep telling you.
When Rohan turned sixteen I told him he could come off it if he wanted. He’s in Year 12 now, doing his A levels, and it felt like the right moment. He thought about it for about four seconds and said no, because it means he can text “come get me” at the end of a party without having to explain where he is. I am, in other words, a taxi with a tracker on it. He also told me, kindly, that the Snapchat map has a ghost mode, that his has been on it since Year 10, and that I should never ever try to join Snapchat. I was secretly pleased about the ghost mode. He doesn’t need every lad in sixth form knowing where he is at all hours. If you’ve got younger ones it’s worth a look at which apps are sharing their location and with who. The NSPCC and Internet Matters both have plain English guides to the settings, which is where I learned most of what I know.
Anjali turned hers off once, last spring, for a whole weekend, without saying anything. I’m not proud of how I handled it. I rang her four times on the Saturday and was halfway through looking up the number for her halls when she rang back and said, very calmly, that she was fine, she was at a friend’s in Hathersage, and she had wanted one weekend where nobody knew where she was. She’s nineteen. She’s an adult. She was right, and I told her so, eventually, on about the Tuesday.
So do I think it’s a good thing? Mostly yes, for us, with the rules. It has saved Priya and me a fair few anxious phone calls, and it has found Kiran’s phone down the back of the sofa at my mum’s twice. But it has also made me worse at waiting. My parents had to sit with not knowing. I hardly ever have to, and I’m not sure I’ve got any better at it.
Kiran’s dot is currently in the kitchen, about four metres from me. She has just messaged me from there to ask if I can send her five pounds.
Rohan’s is at college. I assume. I haven’t looked.
(I have looked.)
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