The new year begins - hello again!

Hello again – Happy New Year.


I am back in the Internet saddle again. Mind you I’m starting to wonder if it is the Internet or myself that is in the saddle?

Just how did I cope before Broadband exactly?

I promised myself at the start of these Christmas Holidays that I would go laptop free and spend real life in the real world for a bit. I wanted some quality time with my family for a change.

Great words.

Great intent.

I think we were all getting on each others tits a bit by the end of it though, but the idea was good.

I’m not going to sit here and write up all the little family moments that happened over Christmas, as funny and lovely though they were to us, like including children’s wide eyed howls of joy as they run in to discover their stockings are full on Christmas day or the way they disgustedly discard new clothes over their shoulder into the piles of wrapping paper, “CLOTHES ARE NOT CHRISTMAS PRESENTS SANTA – READ MY LETTER AGAIN MAN, AT NO POINT DID I MENTION F***ING SOCKS”

Then there is the moment where a child, with no hint of malice whatsoever, loudly declares “Look Dad, Aunt Jessy got me the same DVD Santa got me!”

Any way, we had a lovely Christmas, I really enjoyed it but I suspect those of you with families will have all had exactly the same moments and those of you without won’t really care, so I’m not going to go too far into it.

We spent a lot of effort ensuring that this year we had a really nice, relaxed family Christmas and so that is how it will stay.

What does interest me is just how damned hard it is not to use the Internet. I completely failed to not use it. Oh I managed to stay away from Facebook and Blogging for most of the time (occasional slip ups but on the whole I kept my promise there), but it turns out that life is just not that simple any more.

Even though we did not even have Broadband in England when I got married, within such a short space of time my life has become reliant on it. How did I live without it? How did I plan routes or find out about play parks? When I wanted to buy a new stereo, how did I do it?

I got some vouchers for Christmas to buy a new music system and we have a shop in our town that sells them – so why the Hell did I wind up searching for them on the Internet? Once upon a time I would have walked to the shop, listened to the stereos, said “hmm – that sounds nice and look, the price tag says that I can afford it – bag me one up my good man, and be quick about it” and that would have been it. Times have changed. You see it is no longer this straight forward because it is not possible to walk into a store and browse with children. They will not allow it. In no way shape or form are you allowed to browse and listen to different music systems. You can walk into a shop with children if you know exactly what you want, where it is and if there is no queue at all. Otherwise forget it.

In which case in order to browse you first have to cut a deal. First you have to do a certain amount of ironing or housework in order to earn an afternoon off. Worse still you have to do a swap with your wife, and sit at home looking after the kids by yourself while somebody far more talented at spending money is let loose in town. Having waited until the January sales, this can be deadly.

Therefore your browsing time is precious and this demands that you research before hand what you want the night before online.

There is no escaping the Internet

Having ironed four massive piles of clothes AND sat helpless with children who had by now, started getting a bit frisky, while Jo abused her credit card – I finally made it into town to discover that you cannot actually listen to music these days in a shop, unless you bring your own MP3 or i-pod with songs downloaded from the Internet preloaded on them, to plug into it. I learned fast by watching other shoppers skipping from speaker to speaker playing strange tunes that I have never heard of by inserting their own i-pod (music I haven’t heard of is generally music that doesn’t get played on Heart – which is the kind of station that boasts it plays “more music variety than any other station” but like me, hasn’t been to the shops to stock up on new tunes since 1996)

Eventually I managed to find something I liked but it turned out it wasn’t in stock, and the best advice the spotty girl working there could give me?

Order it online.

Yep.

So any way – I’m back.

Did you have a nice Christmas?