Letter from the editor: Remembering a more innocent age

I had to leave for work before the end of the section but what I did hear got me thinking.

The presenter recalled that, in the days before mobile phones, it you were going for a drink with mates and hadn’t made prior arrangements then you had to embark on a search of pubs until you found them.

And one caller rememebered the pre-broadband era when then only way to connect to the internet was through a phone line.

I could have happily thrown a few things into the mix myself, such a having to wait for a computer game to load via a cassette tape and actually having to get up off your seat to change the TV channel, not that there was much choice then anyway.

Not long ago, as my eight-year-old lay in bed playing with his (my) iPad, I happened to remark that, when I was his age, we didn’t have such technology at our disposal.

He gazed at me in wonderment and innocently asked, “So what did you do then?”.

I bet he wished he hadn’t as I regaled him with stories of my happy childhood days, kicking a ball around the local park for hours on end, playing tennis in the streets and making crossbows out of old pieces of wood and knicker elastic (I probably shouldn’t have told him that one actually!).

Technology has made our life much easier in so many ways but I can’t help but feel we’ve left a much more innocent world behind.