John Pilgrim - I’m not a Luddite – but I still struggle with technology!

I visited my sister June last week which is what I do most weeks. We had a good old chinwag and enjoyed a bowl of soup for lunch. The spaniel managed to talk June into throwing the ball for her and all seemed right with the world.

On the drive back from Northchurch my hearing aid gave a familiar ‘beep, beep, beep’, which I am well aware means that the battery is running out. I removed the hearing and placed it in to my top pocket and continued my drive home.

The strange thing was that I continued to hear the beeps at regular intervals. On my arrival home I took the hearing aid out of my top pocket and placed it on the table while I searched for a new battery. I replaced the battery but the beeping continued, so I left the darned thing on the table and went to do other things.

Finally I returned to take a closer look at the hearing aid and still couldn’t work out just how the thing was beeping when there was no battery in it.

Finally I solved the mystery. On the way home I had my mobile phone in my top pocket and once I arrived home I placed the mobile next to the hearing aid and, naturally, it was the mobile that was beeping and not the hearing aid! So much for my efforts to embrace modern technology.

I have to be honest and admit that although I can find my way around a computer well enough, I have absolutely no idea what an iPod is or indeed all the other stuff they advertise on TV – like these things that allow one to play games just about anywhere in the world or those things that my grandchildren make me play a game of golf on the TV screen with. They have actually devised a cartoon of granddad that I have to look at before I stand on this pad thing and make a swipe at a pretend golf ball!

It is true that’s the only way I can play golf these days but it isn’t very good exercise and nowhere near as satisfying. So I suppose that the next generation will find a way of doing no exercise but pretending to stay fit.