Oh, brave new Lilliput!

Press, 17 April 1980, Page 12

Oh, brave new Lilliput!

WHITEHORNS WORLD

Katharine Whitehorn

There’s a famous and terrible story about a midget in a circus who quarrelled with another midget; and took his revenge by very gradually, day by day, shaving slices off his enemy’s'walking-stick. The other midget, convinced he was growing, and knowing that a large midget is unemployable, eventually committed suicide. I think I know how he felt. I have this dreadful feeling that I am getting larger; or that, at best, everything around me is steadily getting smaller. I’m not talking about things so gigantic that a few. megabillions one way or the other make no difference, things like global companies or the national debt.

I mean actual objects—tiny handbags that hold nothing, modem cutlery that feels too flimsy to cope with anything heavier than a lettuce, or furniture: “genuine” Queen Anne wardrobes have been shrinking for years, as the reproductions have to fit into ever-smaller converted mews cottages; or people re-designing things like watches so that their tiny faces are a complete blank to all but the beady-eyed, London Transport doing the same with their indicators —nothing but a white blur at a distance of more than 20 paces. But above all there is this relentless miniaturisation of machines, now that a' single microchip can hold all that anyone ever needs to know about anything. A calculator used to be a large, serious - looking thing, with big, thumbsized pushing places. Now the really chic ones are so small you can inhale them if you’re not careful, it takes a fine ball-point pen to prod the number and none of its miniconclusions can be seen without a magnifying glass. The same with tape re-

corders: w« used to have a huge growling Grundig that took two men to lift. Now we have a mini-toy with tapes the size of a postage stamp, and it’s possible to lose the anwers to 30 letters down a crack in the floorboards—one of the few things which doesn’t seem to be getting any smaller. You see the thing at its peak in advertisements aimed at executives, espec-

ially in “Signature,” the mag that goes out to Diner’s Club members (sleepy accountants, I am told, often process the . cameras and briefcases along with the genuine travel expenses —at least, that’s the hope.) The rising tycoon, it seems, no longer dreams of a bookcase that turns into a wallsafe. He has a radio that is also a tiny clock, a watch that is also a camera and will tell him the date of his wife’s- birthday and a gold pen that is also a microscopic thermometer. Which seems neat, till you remember that these are precisely the men who never stay in any hotel where there isn’t a clock and a radio in the room already and the temperature is invariably 75 degrees. So why? There’s a fascination in miniatures of course, for their own sake: witness the people who write the Koran on the head of a pin, or make Z-gauge railway sets (all Lapham Junction on a saucer). . But why should the travelling executive want to indulge such passions on his every journey?

The short answer, I suspect, ,is that he doesn’t. He is given these things as gifts; they are toecovers. Toecovers, readers of Betty Macdonald will not need to be reminded, are things like crocheted napkin rings, pincushion covers done in French knots, satin cases for snap fasteners, embroidered coat-hangers and hand-decorated celluloid soap cases for travelling. They are not made because anyone wants -to have them, -but because somebody knows how to make them. And they have to be useful to justify their existence.

So with these tiny toys. Because they have found how to make minute things for jobs where it really matters — for use as pacemakers or in spacecraft — they now have a whole mini-technology they j are trying to use up on something else. ; They make something “useful,” and some mug buys it as a gift, and the mug’s husband has to. take it with him .on his travels, and spend his last halfhour on any trip cursing because he can’t find the minithing. J ! It’s just occurred to me that perhaps most of the wicked devices for spying come into the same category: the watches that fire bullets, the cigarette lighters that emit poisonous fumes, the pens that attract the ammunition from a pistol—perhaps all these, too, were invented just because they were fun t invent; and people go on catching spies and stealing secrets the same way they always did — by finding someone who will tell you something he shouldn’t. I like to think that - the only real difference between James Bond and an Assistant Principal Tax Inspector (Second; Class) is his toecovers. ■