As we get older,we increasingly see the world around us in a new (and slightly disturbing) light.
Police officers get younger, other drivers get more aggressive and the increases in technology baffle us on a seemingly
logarithmic scale.
As I write this, I see certain keys on the laptop in front of me whose role or function in my life totally baffles me.
What is a “Sys Rq” and what possible use to me is “Num Lk” or “Alt Gr”?
These and other strange keys I fear to strike, treating them as if they were red hot and thinking, in the fuddle that is now my mind,
that if I do so I may either cause the Stock Market to crash, bring about the end of the world, or, even worse, my written utterings will
disappear forever into some silently sniggering electronic maw.
I ask my son, ( or The Grand Oracle of All Things Electronic as he is known), and he (in that exasperated tone that we all know),
tells me to look in “The Book!”
But ‘The Book’ is a forbidding tome of miniscule writing, some 600 pages in length, seemingly written in Swahili, Gujarat, German,
Dutch and Swedish, with only the occasional gratuitous nod to those of us who speak English.
Even some of the chapter headings are beyond me!
My father, suddenly behind me on a ghostly day release from his place in heaven, taps me on the shoulder and grins a knowing grin.
A kind of “I told you so” grin.
Having waited many years for this day to arrive, his ethereal fist strikes the air in triumph, and with an echoing laughing cry of
“Revenge! Revenge!” he returns from whence he came, the tobacco-smell of his tweed jacket my only reminder.
I have suddenly become my father, taken his place hitching a lift at the side of the Information Highway.
As he became technologically baffled in life, so now am I.
As I was exasperated by his lack of knowledge, so now is my son with me.
But here was a man intelligent enough to fly with Bomber Command in the last war.
A man who then supported his family by working backbreaking hours as a railway fireman, and who, to his dying day, shuddered at
the thought of firing a ‘Black 5’ locomotive.
He worked with and conquered the technology of his day, but the sudden surge, in his later years left him behind, as it has now done
to me.
So we plod on, “Making the best of it”, as my mother says, marvelling at our newfound electronic world, yet only daring to
dip a toenail into it.
Now, let’s try that DVD control again...