The Day the Screens Went Blank by Danny Wallace (e book reader pdf .TXT) 📕

Anyway, as we walk past the café, I look in the window and the TV isn’t on like it normally is.

The nice thing is that people seem to be talking to each other. Even though all they’re talking about is their phones. ‘What is that, a Samsung?’ I hear one man say to another man.

‘It’s a Sony,’ he says.

‘Has that gone too?’

‘And my Kindle.’

‘Weird, innit?’

‘Weird.’

When I get to school, all my friends tell me it’s happened in their houses too.

Charlie Fennel says they were watching Dr Who on catch-up and right when it got to the really important moment where Dr Who was going to save everybody, the telly just stopped. He said he was devastated because now he doesn’t know how it ends. I wanted to be nice so I pretended I’d seen that episode and told him the way it ends is that Dr Who doesn’t save everybody and actually just dies. Charlie looked a bit confused and sad, but at least he’s got an ending now.

My teacher is Mrs Newington and she’s new in town so we call her Mrs New in Town. She moved to Mousehole because none of the parents at her last school liked her. She used to work in London but she said she prefers it in Mousehole because people don’t spit everywhere. It is a pretty good village so you should Google Earth it. It’s got hundreds of reviews on the internet, and most of them four or five stars, so it’s on point. And you can get a very big sausage roll at Hole Foods.

We’ve also got fresh air and lime-green water and crashing waves and little lanes. Oh, and two beaches! We don’t go out that much though. I wish I could just go exploring on my own, but Mum says there’s too many baddies about, even in Mousehole. We went out more when we were little. I used to love going into the woods and making dens. But, like Mum and Dad say, things just get busy, don’t they? Grown-ups certainly seem to live in a high-pressure environment (at least that’s what my dad says) and so it is only right we all make sacrifices, isn’t it?

But I got a new scooter for Christmas and Teddy got a stunt kite when he turned four this year and we’ve only taken them out once or twice. I always imagine taking my future dog to the beach and letting it get all muddy. I won’t care how muddy it gets, I’ll always wash it. But right now we’re allowed a bit of screen time before dinner, so that’s okay too. I guess anything I really want to experience I can watch on YouTube.

Anyway, Mrs New in Town told us her telly had broken as well, and her phone, and her smart watch. She usually does the register on an iPad but that wasn’t working so she just wrote all our names down on a piece of paper, but then she didn’t seem to really know what to do with it, so she just put the paper in a drawer and shut it.

She said we couldn’t use our magic screen in class to learn today and that she’d put a DVD on for us about the history of the Post Office while all the teachers had an emergency meeting with the headteacher about what to do. But then, of course, when she went to turn the TV on, it wasn’t working either. She seemed really freaked out about it all. I mean, if teachers don’t know what’s going on, then what are us kids supposed to do? Then she tried to make us feel better by saying all the screen stuff was bad right now, but that the grown-ups would fix it soon. The government would be doing something. She said something about a cyber attack.

‘What’s a cyber attack?’ asked Charlie Fennel and I told him that was how Dr Who got killed.

I thought all this was pretty fun at the time because it wasn’t like it could go on for ever. We had a power cut at home once and it was great because we took out the board game me and Teddy got for Christmas and actually played it. And no one could cook because nothing worked so we went out for dinner.

I also didn’t know what Mrs New in Town meant about attacks or the government. Why would they care about some TVs and phones in Mousehole? We’re right the way down at the bottom of the country. We don’t even have a McDonald’s.

But Charlie Fennel said that his dad had been listening to the radio this morning on an old one he got out of his shed. He said that it wasn’t just Mousehole that had been hit by this ‘strange phenomenon’ (cue spooky music). It was everywhere.

So Monday continues as normal, right? But while we were at school, learning about Ancient Greeks and their pots, it turns out all the grown-ups were more concerned about their phones and computers and things.

It’s actually kind of hypocritical (this month’s new word) when you think about it because they’re always the ones going on about how it’s kids that are going to get square eyes, and yet you turn their phones off for a bit and they all start crying in the street.

Dad is muttering and fiddling with an old radio when me and Teddy walk in after school. The radio’s got paint all over it. I think a builder left it here when he did our bathroom. It’s got a metal tube that you have to pull out from the top of it to get a signal and then you have to turn a button to tune it in. It’s so old it looks like something Jesus probably used.

Anyway, Dad finds a radio station and there’s a man saying people should phone in to talk