You can't kindle change in a dinosaur

Luo Jie/China Daily

I'm surrounded by a whole array of the latest high-tech gadgetry－an iPhone, an iPad, a Kindle－and I work on a state-of-the-art computer to bring you this column.

I am totally at home with it all. Well, almost.

If there's a problem, a delightful young colleague will come to the rescue. Like many of her generation, she was born with a gift for technology.

Sometimes I suffer from what the satirical UK magazine Private Eye calls "Aged Hack Baffled by New Technology" syndrome.

Remember, I learned my craft in the world of payphones, typewriters and telex machines, where we used 100-words-a-minute shorthand instead of tape recorders. Shouting to make yourself heard over the row of teleprinters and typewriters in a newsroom was par for the course.

In China Daily's shiny London offices, shouting is definitely not on the menu. But I have to confess to one guilty secret. Much as I'm into saving the planet, preserving forests and making life easier for polar bears, I cannot work on a screen without printing out the documents I need to refer to. The net result is that by the end of the week my desk is awash with computer printouts, newspapers and half-forgotten notebooks.

That inevitably earns me reproachful looks from our administrator.

If someone sends me a link I just have to print it out.

Try as I might, I cannot browse through a newspaper's online edition.

No, it has to be the full-on, in-your-face real newspaper. And when you consider I read, as part of my job, all the main English newspapers, that's a fair number of trees I have accounted for by the end of the year.

There is one ray of hope, however.

I am a book addict. Over the years I have amassed an enormous library of paperbacks and hardbacks, from history to biographies and autobiographies. (By the way, autobiographies by politicians tend to be vast volumes of self-serving nonsense. Avoid.)

When my family and I moved back to London from Hong Kong in 1991, my shipment included 48 boxes solely of books. Pretty much a whole library.

When Amazon first brought out its Kindle, I could be heard loudly proclaiming I would never have one－that books smelt and felt better and that Kindle spelt the end of traditional literature.

So obviously my wife, who knows me better than myself sometimes, gave me a Kindle for Christmas about four years ago. That was it. I was hooked.

Instead of lugging a bag with half a dozen weighty hard-backed books for holiday reading, I could slip in a Kindle with over 4,000 titles at my disposal. It's a no-brainer.

Now I never leave the house without it, literally. It keeps me occupied on the 20-minute commute to work and, if I'm traveling, airports, planes and trains pass in a blur.

It's even better now because the latest Kindle is capable of high-speed internet access, so I can check emails, social media.

But before I get too carried away and destroy my Luddite image, let me briefly address the subject of automobile technology. I have never bought a new car in my life－I have two, a solid, reliable 12-year-old Land Rover Discovery without any whistles and bells, and a much-prized classic 24-year-old BMW, also blissfully technology-free.

Recently on holiday trips to Senegal and Southern France, I hired cars that were barely a month old. Frankly, you needed a degree in rocket science to figure out the built-in satellite navigation in one of them, and the other kept talking to me ... "Don't forget to fasten your seat belt" and "Please put your lights on."

Infuriating.

It was at that point that I decided Kindle or no Kindle, I am a dinosaur.

The author is managing editor, Europe, for China Daily.

chris@mail.chinadailyuk.com