This is NOT what I intended to post today. In fact, I am not even connected to the internet! I am currently sitting on a train on my way home from the holiday that I mentioned a few weeks ago.

Everything had worked like clockwork in the lead up to my holiday on the Baltic Coast. I had pre-written the necessary articles to keep my daily streak ticking over. The train does have WIFI, and maybe it is the spot I am sitting in, but it won’t even connect and so here I am unconnected other than by my phone’s mobile data, and I am sorry but there is no way I am going to bang out an article on my phone with my fat trigger fingers – which are actually acting up again.

BTW, I hope you enjoyed my Kosovo adventures over the last six days. I certainly enjoyed revisiting them, even if there were moments that were unpleasant and even frightening, but here I am quarter of a century later and I am still standing. I simply changed my login to my phone and off I went.

Then this morning I thought, with a five-hour journey in front of me, it would be a perfect time to post something fresh and new. I was going to give a quick review of my holiday, but now this has become more pressing.

If you are interested in my holiday, I may post something with a bit more information tomorrow, but for now I will say that both Older_Rah and Younger_Rah enjoyed themselves and especially on the beach. The Baltic was warmer than expected too!

So, what become more pressing is the way that our lifestyles have and lives have been changed by immediate connectivity and how we seem to be isolated without it. Yet this has only been a reality since the popular advent of broadband and WIFI. While dial-up was around for several years beforehand it was so expensive and it tied up a phoneline too.

Who remembers opening Outlook, writing your emails, so they were poised and ready in your Outbox (I don’t think “Outboxes” even exist anymore, just “Drafts”), then you would connect and press Send / Receive and as soon as everything was sent / downloaded you would disconnect again before reading your news emails. Then you would write your replies and run the process loop again while secretly hoping that no more email was forthcoming that required immediate attention. The whole point was to stay online for the minimum amount of time,

Going back even further, it wasn’t until the mid-eighties that we got a phone and meeting up with friends was either organised at school or during the previous meet up. Even in the early 90s it might involve a quick ring around when organising drinks, but more often than not it was organised the weekend before. We always met at the same time at the same conveniently central place before going on from there. The only variable was which pub we would go to, but in reality, there were probably only four that we visited as our group wasn’t into these fashionable places where the music was pumping and you couldn’t hear yourself thing. At most there was a jukebox in the places we went to and we went more for the pool and the company. My best mate from school even met his wife on one of these occasions over the pool table as her group of mates and ours intermingled. Married almost 30 years now they have two grown up children – and I am still catching up lol.

I am in danger of digressing into a reminisce so as Older_Rah says, Back to the Story.

I suppose my point in today’s ramble is to firstly show how far we have come in such a short period of time (and I haven’t even mentioned AI today) and how we shouldn’t take it for granted. The truth is that 5 hours without broadband access on my computer (more like 6 – door to door) is an inconvenience and nothing more. We were comfortable enough in the 1980s and 1990s so we will get by.

I say this while accepting that older / earlier generations had it much tougher. I once read, and it has a certain ring of truth to it, that Baby Boomers and previous Generations wanted better for their children, but GenX and later only want the same opportunities, so aspirations and hopes have become more diluted with each subsequent generation. If today’s kids are snowflakes (I don’t necessarily agree with this) then we only have ourselves to blame my not modelling resilience, graft and just getting on with it.

And on that note, and as always, I wish for you to stay safe and well my friends.