Christmas, and Alistair Cooke meets a computer - 31 December 1993

Washington this past week was extraordinary to behold, an empty capital that might have been expecting an invasion.

All the senators and the congressmen and the women, all back where they were born or have lived all their lives, that's the rule and the supreme court closed and the president back in Little Rock, doing what president's always do when they go home – strolling along main street waving at small children, hustling into the local barber shop not yet a unisex style emporium, embracing the local dentist and the hardware store owner like long-lost brothers, being photographed on White House orders out with two buddies in camouflage fatigues hunting, shooting pheasants.

The point being made on the soundtrack that one of the three old buddies is a paid up member of the NRA, the National Rifle Association, which for nine years fought any federal gun control legislation. These pictures on the evening telly show that the president is broad minded and while eager to stop bad people killing people doesn't want to take rifles away from good old boys out in the woods in search of game pie.

This Christmas, we gladly left crackling, tooting, roaring New York. This Christmas it was Vermont's turn. It's probably no news to you that just about every airline in America except a couple of small ones is bankrupt or teetering on the verge or boasting that the millions it lost last month mean nothing since the company is about to be, as one executive put it, creatively restructured. This means the creditors may get 25 cents in the dollar; the airline will say "tough luck" and try again.

Consequently, all over the country short flights between small cities 2 or 300 miles have now gone back to propeller planes, which as you know to your sorrow, have to fly through the weather instead of over it.

We've had small jets, 727s and their variants flying for so long on this run from New York to Burlington then northern Vermont that it was a shock to arrive at LaGuardia and find ourselves suddenly back in the early 1950s before the introduction of the jet. Once the plane was called of course it had a smidgen of mechanical troubles so it was a little late, but when we finally went off to board we went down to two flights of steep stairs, rough, I noticed, on one or two old codgers in their 70s then stopped at a gate, then we were directed by a steward into, I kid you not, a bus and driven off half a mile to another part of the airport. We were now directed to a third aircraft on the right and patter along in a perishing wind, it was 10 degrees or 22 below freezing, climb a rope, well a plastic ladder and try to stuff yourself into one of 32 seats. Propellers start to hum and zoom and scream and finally we take off and I was back again in 1944 with the United States Air Force with the air transport command wobbling and bouncing and lurching all over the sky till we hit a fairly clear stream. Some fun.

On the return journey coming down was worse and I heard the by now totally unfamiliar sound of a little boy barking I thought, no he was vomiting. The airline makes no apology or even announcement about the sudden and seemingly permanent suspension of jet flight. Of course, they're busy saving money, jet fuel gobbles up two, three times the rate of a prop plane. Saving money in spite of their constant assurances that while last year was rocky, the coming year is going to be cool or as we used to say, hunky-dory. To turn the knife in this unanticipated wound, the fare cost this time almost twice what it cost last year.

However, we did after an age bounce down in Burlington and were picked up by my son-in-law and off on a 40-minute trip that never fails to amaze. Everywhere unending blankets of snow through the meadows and up into the low hills and then the stiff forests of fur and spruce in the mountains going up to high very silent snow capped peaks. The amazement is stirred by the fact that after only, well I said two small storms didn't I, so four inches one day, five the next. All the roads from the big divided federal highways to the smaller state highways and then to the county two-lane roads and finally the winding mountain roads all clean as a whistle, the snow piled along the edges in neat high ramparts, thanks to the massive snow ploughs and the big separators that whooshed the stuff away from each side of the machine. And if lots more snow does come and you have to go out, there's always the consoling thought that the car or truck or whatever is a four wheel drive on snow tyres.

So up on the mountain road to this white old colonial farmhouse, everything glistening white, the white house in the white buried garden and the white rising mountainside beyond and above it all, what Johnny Mercer called a "blue umbrella sky" for three days and magical nights a still very silent landscape coated with delicious Christmas icing. The only humans in sight were three bouncing Disney dolls in blinding scarlet and green, all but the dullest colours are blinding in this sparkling light.

The dolls are the living dolls of three granddaughters, the baby aged seven is a very active imp and after clomping knee deep in the crisp and even sees it's time to come in and scrape away on her fiddle at the man she calls Mr Bach, JS that is. She learned from the age of three the Japanese system and I must say the results are remarkable. Soon after her breakfast on Christmas morning, the little pile of presents was left beside the tree and the father and the three girls collected round the prize present and when we left two days later they were still at it, Poppa's new computer.

I ought to say that for the past 10, 20 years I have resolutely refused to buy to learn to use a word processor to the beseechings of my high-tech friends to put away my ridiculous portable manual machine born in 1960s still going strong, I respond with one question. "Does it write better prose?" they all mutter and eventually grumble "well no, but..." However, I have to say that after watching the operations of this new computer, I was at one with the cooing goggle-eyed girls. After an hour or two, the eldest girl appeared to have a whining complaint, "What is it?" asks her sainted father; she wants to know about seagulls.

All right, he says, get into birds and the compule (?) with the portas frigus (?) mode, she taps this and that, watches the little mooching arrow on the screen. Up comes a list like a laundry list of birds, okay migrants no, singing birds, well sort off. Eventually, seagulls, pages of information rolling by like a paper towel about their origin biology, life habits, distribution, types of etc. Then suddenly another tap and where are we now at the seashore, marvellous squeaking crying gull sounds, sounds of a flight or squawk of seagulls.

Now this was news to me, how about a few biographies let's try Charlemagne, very good very informative. How about Bobby Jones? Up he comes the immortal one and another tap, another button and there he is with his inimitable swing, which the late Bernard Darwin compared to the drowsy beauty of an English summers day. How about Franklin Roosevelt? Reams of stuff, but also another tap or two and we hear him doing his never forgotten inaugural speech on the day the money stopped, 4 March 1933, that high fluting confident tenor, "we have nothing to fear but fear itself". This machine has been fed the material I guess, text is the cool word of several encyclopaedias, old news reel libraries sound recordings from true landslides to the lowly Bobwhite dictionaries, commentaries and heaven knows what else.

When I eventually staggered off to swipe a touch of Christmas spirit, a present from Scotland, my son-in-law said in suspiciously lazy fashion, "how about this?" I moved across the room back to the screen and there outrageously for all to see with dates and cocky opinions what they now call value judgements was a biography going on for a page or two at the top in blatant capital letters "COOKE ALISTAIR JOURNALIST BROADCASTER BORN …" never mind, on and on for all to see. The Russians had the KGB, we, you can have this computer.

The New Year has come in from the East, the Far East with a thundering bit of news; it took up to two pages of the New York Times's business section and bewildering to me technical essay along with knotty diagrams about hydrogen bridges connecting cotton molecule chains courage. What it all means, is as the headline put it, a dream unfolds. Tokyo 28 December: Japanese and Americans working together on the verge of a technological breakthrough, the first products are already to hand. What a cotton shirt, 100% cotton shirt that requires no ironing even a dress shirt. This is being hailed as an invention second only to Thomas Alva Edison's electric bulb.

Of course for 20, 30 years there have been polyethylene mainly blended with one part cotton and the fibres were coated with formaldehyde impregnated resins. The new all-cotton boys now remark that formaldehyde can pose a health hazard so there!

It's not perfected just yet, but by midsummer they expect to be on the market, the rousing slogan of the inventors is "unplug the iron, mother" so in the great march of human progress or decline, the flat iron and the ironing board will soon join the ashtray and remnants or artefacts of an earlier civilisation and in the decade or so you may see one or both of them up for auction at Christie's or Sotheby's for, say, $10,000 a piece.

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