High Time

It's a year since I last blogged. My son, who blogs and tweets as part of his job, is sorrowfully critical of my incapacity to find time or material. One needs to open Blog and Twitter accounts for a purpose, and I realise that I only did so because it seemed the adult thing to do when running a ministry. Running the ministry is actually easier than blogging and tweeting, and beyond the ministry I have other duties to perform, so blogging and tweeting are low down on my list of priorities.

The other problem is what I would call the "modesty factor". In order to be confident enough to blog and tweet regularly, one has to be absolutely certain that one's utterances will be of interest to others, and not just be words spewed out for the sake of being read and noticed. That's what holds me back. My son says I should re-tweet other people's tweets or utterances, but I don't actually know how to do it. Usually I don't have time, anyway, to decide which segment is worthy of being disseminated. I tend to read articles and long emails in the quiet of the evening, by which time I'm perilously close to dozing, and wouldn't have the inspiration to mark out tweets for onward transmission. I tend to speed-read, anyway.

It's struggles like these which mark us, the non-technological generation, from our offspring, who often seem to have absorbed, as if by osmosis, knowledge and techniques which seem completely baffling to us. The thing is, we don't always feel we need this knowledge in order to potter along on our PCs or laptops, whereas it appears to be essential for our children to grasp the complexities of networking in order that they can live, and move and have their being. In a short time I have progressed to buying a tablet (which, mini though it is, I just love), and with swipe-screen now no longer so terrifying, a new smart- phone. I didn't need the tablet, but I did need the phone, since my darling old Nokia was dying by inches. Nevertheless, this advent into my life of not one, but two, modern pieces of equipment feels like real progress. I'm still not opening a Facebook account, though.