EMAIL

 Dear Harry,

I was just thinking as I was going through the tedious daily ritual of deleting unsolicited email after unsolicited email--dozens of them, in fact--that you never, ever received one of these during your entire life. You never opened a computer, never racked your brains to remember a bloody "password", never Googled anything... You never had a telephone where you could check the weather anywhere in the world, visit the stock market, find the solution to the daily crossword puzzle. make a "FacetTime" video call to someone in Australia--for "free"!--never hit the "send" button by mistake, before you'd finished your text, never made a "butt call" and would not have the first idea what that might mean. 

Whatever did you do without it?

In the days when telephones were telephones, attached to the wall with a cable that only reached so far, you had to "dial" the number you wished to reach on the rotary dial. Calling required some physical action beyond one finger (thumbs, it seems, for the young and those more expert than myself) hovering over the keypad. There was a sense of "connection" through the wires. For most of your life, if there was no one at the other end of the line to receive your call, you could not "leave a message". You'd have to try again another time. As for international or transatlantic calls, particularly at Christmas, don't even ask...

Well, Harry, times have changed. I now carry my phone in my pocket everywhere I go. It takes photographs! Or movies! And transfers them instantaneously to anyone I want to send them to! No more loading film into the camera and taking it to be "developed"! Oh, it's all so convenient, so easy, Harry. You can manage your entire life on this little thing, smaller even than a pack of twenty cigarettes. Imagine. 

And oh, by the way, I'm "posting" this on my "blog." Again, don't ask.

With love, Peter