Broadband connection lost

Before you reach the oldest village in Europe – at Skara Brae, in Orkney – you have to travel back in time. From the visitor centre, out across the tussocky grass, there’s a waymarked route, punctuated with milestones, taking you on a history lesson back to the beginnings of society. I imagine it’s to help build suspense across what is, actually, quite a bleak, wind-scorched promontery.

“1969, Man Lands on the Moon” declares the first painted boulder. Further along, “1492, Columbus reaches America”. You get the idea.

Back, back it goes. By the time you reach the 2,500 BCE marker post, “The Great Pyramid of Giza completed”, you can taste the sea spray on your lips. Skara Brae, hunkered into the coastline, lies just ahead, and even further back in time. It was built at least 700 years before the pyramids – at around 3,200 BCE.

Here, sunk into the subsoil, is a startlingly complete set of Neolithic houses, woven together in a series of paved passageways. If only the builders charged with the new Edge Lane development could take a field trip, we might be spared the heartache and court battles when residents are uprooted, as the new houses are demolished in twenty years’ time.

Skara Brae’s dwellings are no Neolithic student digs – these are fully furnished luxury seaside residences. Like a prototype Centre Parcs, the layout of each house is pretty standard. Hearth in the centre, seating around the walls and, pride of place,  the dresser – a huge stone cabinet constructed with one thing in mind. To display their nick-nacks.

Now, this was in a time before the Franklyn Mint, so instead of limited edition hand-painted John Wayne dinner plates, they’d no doubt have had to make do with sea shells, sheep skulls and early Echo and the Bunnymen cassettes.

The point? That, ever since we came down from the trees, we’ve been hoarders. We’ve defined ourselves by the stuff that surrounds us.
In fact, that’s probably why we stopped swinging from the canopies. It’s difficult to keep a grip of your Louis Vuitton when you’re grappling with a bonobo, 60 feet above the forest floor.

I guess the clue’s in the phrase ‘hunter gatherers’. Not content with merely stalking buffalo, we were desperate to collect a glittery pebble collection the envy of our neighbours.

So, the more I hear about the Cloud – the concept of actually owning nothing ‘real’, but uplinking to a Google land of plenty, somewhere over the rainbow, the more I feel we’re just not ready to let go of our wordly goods just yet.

David's dodgy dewey system

Millions of years of evolution and what will we have to show for it? An account with Audible.com and an iPad? We’re just not hardwired for that. What would happen to the Hello photospreads, if Stephanie Beacham couldn’t be photographed next to a mahogany bookcase groaning with a leather-bound collection of first editions?

Call me Neolithic.