Keeping in touch requires a connection and also a willingness for communication to take place. Then again, contact can be meaningful, even without a conversation – the act of contact by whatever means is often enough to establish and confirm you care.

Some people, like me, don’t need constant confirmation that someone cares about them.  Phone calls, cards, letters, and these days, all sorts of electronic messaging can easily work to keep us in touch. But lots of us don’t feel comfortable with the ‘new’ electronic messaging that younger folk have adopted as their, perhaps only, means of making contact with others. It seems often to be very public and not as directly connected to just one individual, although I have learned to almost cope with ‘WhatsApp’.

Personally, I prefer to speak on the phone (even a mobile one!) or write an email. I have never quite got my head around ‘social’ messaging. I do see the value, of course, of the immediacy of all those myriad types of social media and methods.

But some of us oldies are not comfortable with it – and I can’t quite describe why I am so averse to it. Well, maybe I can: I simply just didn’t ‘grow up’ with it.

I was a six year old when WW2 broke out, and when my uncle returned from that war after serving in Tobruk, he taught me how his platoon had built radio receivers using a coil made from discarded copper wire, a safety razor blade and an earphone scrounged from an enemy camp. He and his mates were desperate to hear anything in spoken english, the BBC or even some music of any nationality!

Years later in 1957, when I married my sweetheart, Dorothy, in 1957 we had to be on a waitlist to get a landline phone, and only the arrival of our first-born twin children was sufficient to bump us up the list have one installed! No TV in our house for a while later, and then what a little screen! I think it was a ‘fourteen inch’!

That phone, though, was the star. At last Dorothy and I could actually talk with our country parents. But ‘trunk line’ calls were expensive and timed so we soon learned to use the phone sparingly, especially as our cost of living with a growing family was escalating.

Old habits die hard – and although these days modern cell phones mean instant, almost free, contact any time anywhere, I think I’m still, sort of, living in the past and can’t quite break out of my dinosaur habits! Is there anyone else out there who is still on the same bus as me?