“What’s the first letter of the alphabet?”

“A…”

“Okay… then turn it to A.”

“Okaaay…”

“Now twiddle the little whirly thing all the way…”

This conversation came to you courtesy of mother and son. No, not a toddler and young mother… the son is nearly 30… and Mum still has all her marbles… well, I like to think I do. My sons would beg to differ on that point, of course. As  matter of principle.

This was a highly technical conversation… but he’d lost me early on so he decided to dumb it down a bit.

My son is teaching himself photography, and while I am seldom found without a camera in my hand I have no real understanding of the mechanics of the thing beyond the basic optics I learned in physics. I certainly don’t have a fraction of his technical ability… and he’s trying to share that with me. Mostly unsuccessfully, I have to add.

I’m not bad with technology, though, as a rule. It doesn’t scare me and I can generally work it out. My sons, however, have grown in an era when the technological advances come so thick and fast into our everyday lives that while they have developed an almost instinctive understanding of it, I question whether we have almost lost the sense of wonder as we daily see the science fiction of our childhood become mundane gadgetry. Some of the stuff we use every day has outstripped anything those of us who watched the first moon landing might have imagined as possible. We even take for granted the way we can type on a screen and be read instantaneously all across the world. Technology is in every corner of our lives.

Even the dog is microchipped.

Yet for all the incredible gadgets around us, it is the ‘human’ things that still move us the most. I include Ani in this category. Not because she clearly thinks she is head of the household (and she may well be right about that…) but because it is through very human qualities that we interact.

Continue reading here