The Day the Screens Went Blank Danny Wallace (best summer reads .TXT) 📖

‘Keep calm and carry on!’ Turns out all that was needed was for the grown-ups to be affected by something!

Apart from not having to sit in boring lessons all day, there are three other reasons why this is great news.

First of all, I get to see Grandma.

Second of all, we get to save Grandma from feeling lonely and confused, which pretty much makes us superheroes.

And third of all – it’s a family adventure! I don’t remember us ever having one before. The closest we get is watching Dad play Zelda on the Nintendo.

Okay, so it’s only sitting in the back of a car for ten hours on a motorway.

But it’s a rescue trip, which makes it an adventure!

The next morning, Mum and Dad pack the car. It’s not actually our car, it’s Dad’s work’s car, but he got to choose the colour (red) and we use it all the time, not just when he’s working. We have no idea how long we’ll be away for, so we bring a bit of everything.

All Teddy wants is his iPad so he can watch Paw Patrol and I have to gently explain to him that we’re going to look out of the window instead. He looks at me like I’m mad. I tell him that we can pretend they’re screens and won’t that be fun? But he starts crying. Life will be easier when he’s five and becomes a more mature travel companion.

I have packed all the essentials you need for an adventure, including a ruler, a compass and a protractor. Dad’s bringing sleeping bags because Grandma won’t be expecting visitors, and Mum says we can do a big shop for food and anything we’ve forgotten at one of the motorway services on the way.

I love motorway services. They’re like little islands in the boring concrete sea. For some reason motorway services change the rules and laws in our family because I’m always allowed to play the arcade machines while Dad has a pee. I hope the arcade machines are still working. But if not, I will just have to come to terms with what Teddy will one day also understand: the fact that life can be cruel.

Dad says we need to drop by his office in Penzance to let everybody know he’ll be away. Mum asks Sandra to water our plants, but says we should be back in a day or two. Sandra asks if we’re going anywhere nice and Dad just rolls his eyes. I guess he’s not looking forward to the drive.

When we get in the car, I make sure my pillow is nicely plumped up, and Dad starts the engine and says, ‘Right!’

This is it! We’re off!

And then we all just sit there for a moment as Dad realizes that the GPS screen in the car that tells him where to go is broken too. Dad has no idea how to get anywhere if the computer lady doesn’t tell him. But he doesn’t seem to want to accept she’s not there at the moment, so keeps jabbing the button that says Nav and saying, ‘Hello?’

Up until a few years ago, we didn’t have any robot helpers. Now we’ve got loads of them, thank goodness. There’s Siri and Alexa and the Google person and the lady who lives in the car and tells us where to go. I wonder how they’re spending their time now the screens have gone. I hope they’re all hanging out together, enjoying not being asked annoying questions like, ‘What’s the weather like?’ all the time. It’s beyond me how they don’t just reply, ‘You’ve got a window! Check the weather yourself!’

Mum decides that we’re going to need a map and checks the little shelf on her side of the car, but there’s no map in there, which she should know because there’s never been a map in there. She laughs and says when she was a kid everyone always had a map in their car. A whole yellow book with every single road in Britain. Which, honestly, sounds like the dullest book ever!

Sometimes when Dad’s work friend Boring Paul visits all he does is tell us how he drove to or from various places. ‘Oh, I got the A9 until the B52 then the C3P0 was full so I stopped at the Burger King and had fries, a Whopper, some chilli-cheese bites and a Sprite.’

I don’t know why grown-ups do this. There must be an age you get to where you think everybody needs to know how you ended up standing in front of them. It’s not like I come down to breakfast and say, ‘So I took the hallway to the stairs and then it was straight down and a quick right to the kitchen.’

Anyway, Mum says she can’t remember the last time she even saw a paper map, and this doesn’t help Dad, who’s gone bright red and a bit sweaty.

‘There’ll be one at the office,’ he says, and reverses the car out of the driveway, but because the screen that shows what’s behind you isn’t working, he immediately hits our bin. Then he gets redder and even more sweaty.

Luckily, Dad at least knows the way to his office because he goes there every single day. I think that means that deep down he must actually enjoy going there. Mum’s brought the radio from the kitchen and extra batteries because she cleverly suspected the radio in the car wouldn’t work properly. This is excellent organization on the part of Mum and deserves recognition.

There’s also a screen in front of Dad that shows useless things like how far he’s been, but also useful things like how fast he’s driving.

Anyway, that’s all gone too. Did I tell you my dad was a slow driver? Well, guess how much slower he is when he doesn’t have anything to tell him how fast he’s going? Answer: REALLY SLOW!!

As we