Last night’s TV

I really enjoyed the BBC TV programme ‘The Virtual Revolution’ last night. At the time my husband was seeing if he had successfully bid on a toy on e-Bay. My daughter was on facebook (and very annoyed that I’d commented on one of her photos—so I won’t do that again). My eldest son was listening to music he’d downloaded from the internet and my next son was catching up with revision using the BBC bitesize website. So, the whole family a testament to the internet revolution.

Meanwhile my father is living in luddite ignorance. I feel for him. He left it too late. He really thinks that getting on-line is an insurmountably difficult thing to master. I have taken him by the hand and led him through the process innumerable times. And at first he’s absolutely fine – in fact he thinks it’s fascinating as he looks at websites form his former homes of Uganda, Fiji and Hong Kong. And I say to him ‘you must do this every day or you’ll forget’ and he does for 2 or 3 days and then he loses interest. And then I get a call a month later asking me how he’s supposed to get on the internet or send an email. And despite him having a completely different computer set-up to mine I try to help him over the phone—then after half an hour of giving up my time to help him, he loses patience half-way through the exercise and gives up. Almost every time I go through this exercise I show my father Judith’s wonderful blog ‘Not Dead Yet’, in the hope that she will inspire him to persist at it.