Storyteller's World

Driving to the flat on the first day of our holiday, we answered the ringing mobile phone and it was Mum.

Aged P: 'Oh, I thought you'd be at the flat and I would get you there.'

Wife: 'No, we're still on our way there, we're in the car.'

Aged P (in great astonishment): 'I didn't know I could get you in the car as well!?'

The concept of the mobile phone and how it works, is still alien to people of my mother's generation. (Though I think it can take others a while to get used to it, as well; like the young woman we overheard once answering her phone in the entrance to Sainsbury's: 'Yes, I'm in the supermarket - but how did you know this is where I would be?')

To those of us who have seen so much technological change in our lifetimes (but haven't my parents too?) and think of ourselves as pretty computer and technology savvy, it seems almost incomprehensible that we could be as fazed by new technology when we are 80. But who knows what might be everyday gadgetry by then: teleportation, text and image transference by brain implants (constant broadband access to whatever succeeds the Internet, and all via that inward eye which is the bliss of solitude)? And - no, it's too far-fetched even to mention it - maybe a VCR that can be programmed by someone over the age of 15.