Anne: Calm down dear - it's only a gizmo! You seem to be taking this all rather personally. Let me explain; I have always been at odds with the society in which I live, and have suffered all manner of abuse for it - verbal and, in my school days, physical. Forgive me if I now see fit to hand some of it back. I am not meaning to be nasty to anybody, unlike a great many of the people I have had to deal with in my time. There is an element of rib-poking in what I say. However, it does seriously concern me that I am living in a society which very quickly becomes obsessed with anything new. This is almost always fairly short-lived; in the '70's, everybody around me was sneering at me for not wearing flares, tank tops, platform shoes, etc. Then all that stuff suddenly went out of the window, and within a very short time, those same people were looking at photos of themselves from two years earlier, and cringing in embarassment. This kind of thing is increasingly being applied to technology (and the van, by the way, isn't technology; it's mechanics. That's bad enough, but I don't fancy living in a horse-drawn caravan on our roads, much though the idea appeals.), and I now find myself being sniped at - not by you lot, but by people around me, for not having a mobile phone or satnav. Apart from my concern about the rapidly-growing mountain of redundant technology (which is redundant by the time you've got it home and taken it out of the box), I don't think it's such a great idea to jettison everything that went before - which is what happens. The amount of human skill and knowledge that has been built up over many centuries, only to be abandoned during my adult life time, is quite frightening. Technology is the bore of the age, and half the time, it doesn't even work. You mention emails; they are unreliable. Some seem to disappear into cyberspace (a place which doesn't even exist), while others arrive a week or more late. A friend of mine told me he'd had one which was sent out six months earlier. And I'm not being stuck up; I just wish some of you would pop into the real world now and then; you'd be very welcome.
M.Ted: Why haven't I got a future?
Al: yes - I ve heard of them, but I couldn't eat a whole one.
John Kelly.