Having recently spent some time with my parents, it made me think about the impact of technology. My father has just past his 85th birthday and is on the outside of the digital revolution. I feel this is a real shame as he has a huge curiosity about life and the world around him. Unfortunately dealing with computers and the web is not something that comes naturally to him. It is often thought by younger generations that the old are slow and backward, caused by the fact that the technology around today , by its very essence is beyond their capabilities because it wasn’t present when they were younger. This has to be a fallacy, one look at the complexity of a Roll Royce Merlin engine or ingenuity required to discover the workings of our solar system should put that idea beyond doubt. Unfortunately the slowness of older people is not unique to the present age; this is due to the ageing process and something that potentially affects us all, unless medical science can make the kinds of breakthroughs for the brain that have been achieved with the body. With this in mind it came as a bit of a surprise and disappointment that one of my favourite commentators Richard Ingrams of the ‘Independent’ was rather scathing about some of the changes that technology has brought to our society. I appreciate that Mr Ingrams makes a living out of being an oldie but he has more often than not stuck me as one of the few commentators today that manages to bring something to modern debate which is beyond the obvious and hackneyed remarks which everybody else in the media is saying. Because of this it came as even more of a surprise when he was bemoaning the end of cheques and coin accepting phone boxes. No doubt people were uncomfortable when cheques first arrived or perhaps when note were first introduced or when coins were introduced having symbolic value and people no longer exchanged usable commodities. Would he have been up in arms when William Caxton introduced the printing press into this country and put all the scribes out of work, maybe he would have written a similar piece in his paper like the one he wrote in January but on reflection perhaps not.