When those of us who are over-sixty were young, there were very few ways of communicating with people who didn’t live nearby. There were handwritten letters (remember them?), there was the house phone, and, in an emergency, there was a telegram. Getting one of those was an event – often the source of panic.

Now, we are overwhelmed with choice. In addition to the traditional landline, there is the mobile phone and its accompanying written forms, like text and WhatsApp. In addition, via computer (or mobile phone), there is email.

And we can even see the person we are communicating with, if we want, using Skype (or similar apps) for discussions between two people, and Zoom and a number of equivalent apps for on-line meetings between many people.

Not to forget the numerous forms of social media, like Facebook and Twitter, but so many, many more. It has become so very much easier.

Or has it?

When to Use What?

We are now clearly spoiled for choice when it comes to communication. But this has brought in its wake a serious dilemma. When should you use text and when email? Are there social rules, or even conventions, for which is the most appropriate method for particular circumstances?

Perhaps it is a social gaffe to invite friends to dinner by text, but not by email. Perhaps thank-you notes should be sent only in writing.

I’m darned if I know.

Who Uses What?

But it is not simply when to use what medium but remembering who uses which one. If you get this wrong, you may not communicate at all.

Mobile Phones

I have never been comfortable with my mobile phone. The landline is fine and I use it all the time. But I have never got into the habit of doing the right thing with my mobile, leading to any number of problems.

First, I rarely carry it around, partly because it really doesn’t fit in most of my pockets. The best is the back pocket of my blue jeans, but you know where that lands when there is a call of nature. Or would, if I am not very careful.

Then there is the problem of whether it is turned on or off. I try to remember to put it on when someone is due to phone me, but I often forget. Various members of my family have been hugely frustrated on numerous occasions.

And then it goes off when I least want it to – the most embarrassing being the Evensong service in Lincoln Cathedral, where we were visiting a couple of years ago. And that turned out (when I checked later) to be a wrong number. I hadn’t even remembered that I had my phone with me.

I haven’t even mentioned, ensuring the phone is charged. I had that problem this very morning.

I have a friend who uses her mobile phone very diligently, but she says she never listens to her voice mails. So, I need to remember not to leave a message if I phone her, although that would be the natural thing to do.

Texts and WhatsApp

Text seems the most popular with people, complete with all the little abbreviations that I, in my old-fashioned way, find abhorrent. ‘For’ becomes 4, ‘you’ becomes U, ‘see’ becomes C and so forth. You probably know already.

I write everything out, as if I were about to be graded on my English by a high school teacher. It probably makes me look very prim.

On the other hand, I avoid writing texts altogether. They take too much time, typing out each letter at a time unless the phone can guess what I want to say. Most people know not to text me, if only because I never get the message until it is too late.

Texts and WhatsApp seem like the same thing to me but are completely different. My older grandson uses WhatsApp all the time but has never texted me in his life. Many others are the opposite.

I have no idea why, but I need to remember which friend does which.

Emails

My favourite means of communication is email, as I am comfortable on my computer and can write an email quickly. It does not feel gimmicky – just very straight-forward. Fortunately, most of my friends are the same.

But not everyone looks at their email every day. I know my husband doesn’t, and we have occasionally had worried phone calls from friends, checking that he is OK.

Video Communication

We have all become accustomed to Zoom meetings during the period of lockdown. I find them ok for meetings but prefer not to see friends when I am talking to them.

It is much more relaxing to lie on a bed while chatting by phone than sitting up carefully to look into a screen.

Social Media

For many of us, social media are unknown territory, best left to a younger generation. There are now so many different platforms – hands up those of you familiar with TikTok – that sorting them out is a nightmare.

But if you are active on, say, Facebook, how many of your friends can you assume have seen your postings? Do you send them the same information by email, just in case? Or is this considered overkill?

Trying to Keep Up

I guess I am not made for the modern world, although I do try to keep up as best I can. But keeping up with the disparate mindsets of my friends and family is a serious job. I have thought of setting up an excel spreadsheet to mark the best way to communicate with each person.

Do you have a better solution?

This post was first published by SixtyandMe.com

Do you experience enormous aggravation when things don’t work properly – and, more disturbingly, break down?

I don’t mean important things like your medication or even local transport. No, I mean the computers and numerous appliances on which we all increasingly rely.

At one point or another, they tend to exhibit some kind of technical malfunction and worse, much worse, stop altogether. They have hidden ways of making us suffer.

My house is full of technology that has been going haywire over the last few days, as if some evil spirit had cast a spell to irritate me on numerous fronts. It has certainly succeeded.

Telephones

First, there is my telephone system. Simple wireless handsets, bought four years ago from a good shop and made by a well-known Japanese manufacturer, are suddenly emitting frequent bleeping sounds (not rings) for no particular reason. I duly changed the batteries and they behaved themselves for one day, but the problem returned.

The company provides no phone number for assistance, but I tried an email helpline. After some days, I received a proposed ‘solution’ written in such obscure English that it was impossible to comprehend.

I am biding my time until some ’techie’ visitor can tell me what to do. I can at least work around it.

Dishwasher

Second, there is my very reliable German dishwasher, which has washed dish after dish with no problems for over 11 years. Suddenly, the electronic numbers on the front of the machine, which tell you how much longer the programme is supposed to run, seem to bear no resemblance to likely reality.

We put the machine on, it goes for 40 minutes, then it takes a rest with no lights and no explanation. At the point when we feel that it has stopped completely, the lights go on, it begins to work for a while, but stops before finishing the cycle. This can go on all night.

This makes a guessing game of whether our dishes are washed sufficiently to put them away. But we can live with it.

The manufacturer tells me that it might be a simple issue and is worth investigating. I have therefore called in an engineer.

Computer

But by far the worst is my computer, which has definitely got the upper hand over me, and has recently been showing me who is boss.

I opened it the other day only to find that every Excel document on the computer was blank. All data gone, from some old statistics to my current financial tally for what I owe my neighbour who has been shopping for me. Total panic.

Yesterday, the device decided that I shouldn’t be able to print anything. The printer, which has never caused me any problems, ceased to exist as far as the computer was concerned. If a printer does not show up on a computer, you cannot print. Great frustration.

And with all these difficulties, I decided I really must back up the computer, a task I have ignored for much too long. But my external disk drive was nowhere to be seen on the computer itself. Nothing much I could do but worry. Which I did, for sure. There were important documents to back up.

Luckily, there is an excellent technical advice service by telephone for this brand of computer and I have become very familiar with it. One of these days, I will be able to recite the number off by heart.

Each problem seems to take at least an hour to solve, don’t ask me why, but I did manage to get each of these difficulties resolved, one by one. It is all working now, and the lost data was mysteriously restored.

Of course, these were only minor problems next to what a computer can present you with. It can do all sorts of things to stop you using it, even when turned on, or – much worse – break down completely. Nowhere to write, no access to Google to look up information (including a helpline number), no incoming or outgoing emails.

I don’t know about you, but I feel lost altogether when this happens. Angry, frustrated, and at a complete loss.

Naming the Frustration

For years, I have felt that there should be a word for the absolutely gripping frustration we sense when our computers are down. It is like a kind of illness or, perhaps mental illness.

You become irritable, you can’t settle, and you can think of little else. You are definitely no fun to be around. It is something to do with the loss of connection to the rest of the world or, even stronger, loss of agency.

This afternoon, I decided to do something about this.

I wrote to my son, now a university teacher. He was always clever with words and has a number of languages under his belt. I suggested he might combine the word that would have meant computer in ancient Greek if they had such things, with a suitable word for emotional pain or grief.

He replied that the word hypologistes in modern Greek means a reckoner and algia is the usual ending for pain, like myalgia. So, the word might be something like ‘hypologistalgia‘.

But he suggested it might be better to go with the German instead and he came up with the word rechnerschmerz. Rechner, he wrote, is one word for computer (although modern Germans tend to use the English word computer), and schmerz means pain, including emotional pain (as in weltschmerz).

Rechnerschmerz – this sounded just right. German sometimes has a way of sounding like its meaning.

I now know what I am suffering from. Do you recognise cases when you have suffered the same malady?

(This was initially published by SixtyandMe.com)

Until we all went into lockdown – the ‘before’ period that feels like another time altogether – I used to love to eat out. Although I am a moderately good cook (and my husband a willing sous-chef), there is so much to be said for it.

Making an Occasion

First, it is such a nice way to make an ‘occasion’. We put on somewhat nicer clothes (and, for some restaurants, much nicer clothes) and feel we are already in a different-from-normal situation.

We are waited on, of course, and have the pleasure of choosing what we will eat that day. It is fun to choose different things from the menu and taste each other’s choices.

We can sit and talk for as long as we want, with someone bringing food or drink as needed. If it is somewhere with a view, so much the better.

New Dishes

Eating out also gives the chance to eat food we don’t normally eat – and sometimes I discover something I feel I could make at home. If I am keen on a dish, I will ask the chef how he or she makes it.

I also love the way some restaurants make food look especially inviting. We do that a little at home, but with much less of the flair – no swirls in the soup or parsley artfully scattered.

New Ideas

Sometimes, it is simply a matter of a new idea about food.

We once had an anniversary dinner at the Connaught Hotel in London, with its very special surroundings (a handsome room with wood panelling), and it then had a well-known female chef.

At the end of the meal, after a very delicious dessert, the waiter brought a simple basket of large dark Italian cherries. I would never have known it, but cherries are just the thing to settle the digestion after a large meal.

Every time I eat cherries, I think of that occasion.

Special Meals

I have some clear memories of particular meals, often served outdoors somewhere in Europe (or ‘on the continent’, as we say in England).

A totally unexpected platter of prawns, herbed vegetables, and garlic bread, beautifully laid out, provided by a very unpretentious hotel in the Basque area of Spain. It had no restaurant, but we had asked if they could rustle up something simple because we didn’t want to drive further that evening.

The seafood platter served on the terrace of a beautifully situated hotel in the French Alps, not far from Chamonix. The food was not only delicious but happened to be accompanied by a distant small avalanche within our view.

The seven-course vegetarian meal, each course more inventive than the last, in a restaurant in the Auvergne area of France. I love good vegetables, but they are so rare in good restaurants, as chefs usually focus on the meat.

To add to the surprise (we had chosen the place because it had a Michelin star), but when we arrived, they told us with regret that they had lost the star, but we had an out-of-date guide and therefore did not know that.

I could go on.

The Downside

But there are some things I don’t like at all about eating out. I don’t like the bowing and scraping of elegant waiters, asking constantly “Did you enjoy the meal?” Indeed, I don’t like that question in any restaurant. I don’t want my napkin placed into my lap when I sit down.

I don’t want a waiter pouring my wine or water every time I take a few sips. Indeed, one of our tests of a good restaurant is whether the waiter will desist from this, once we make it clear we prefer to pour our drinks ourselves.

Mutual Pleasure

Eating out should feel like there is a mutual pleasure between the restaurant staff and you, the customer. You may or may not meet the chef, but the person bringing the food should feel enthusiastic about it and greet your interest and comments with warmth, not formality.

Preferably, they make you feel that they want nothing better than to please you. Such restaurants are hard to find, but they are the ones we keep going back to.

In recent years, our favourite restaurant met all these criteria. The premises were not remotely fancy, but the food was perfectly cooked tapas of all kinds, brought to the table hot from the kitchen in whatever order it was cooked.

Because we ate there frequently, we got to know the people who ran it and could joke with them about all sorts of things. And then, a year ago, they told us the sad news that they were closing, as they wanted to move on to other activities.

We never managed to replace it.

All Change

But since Covid-19 has been upon us, we have not eaten out once. I don’t like the idea of being served by people in masks. It changes the nature of the occasion. Perhaps I will learn, but we haven’t tried.

One of life’s losses for the moment.