What Technology Has Changed and What it Hasn’t

When I was at St Andrew’s school I regularly came home to an empty house with one parent working 9 to 5 and the other doing shifts. I was what was called a ‘latch key kid’. My biggest problem was that I often forgot the key to go into the latch! Often, my Mum would come home to find me in the garden or sheltering from the rain at the back. You would have thought that I would have learnt after a couple of times, but no. I was still occasionally forgetting my key into my teens. A lack of organisation was the root cause, exacerbated at Secondary school by very high levels of dread and fear at the prospect of going to school. Nowadays I still need to let myself in on a regular basis and I have a place for my key so I don’t forget it.

That key is next to my wallet so I don’t forget that either. I now have a card wallet that seldom contains actual money, and I miss that. When you spent over 40 years of your life using notes and coins, that still seems like the default setting for daily life. When I was younger I had notes and coins and always kept them in the pockets of my trousers and my coat. That would often cause me to get to a shop, decide to buy something and then search through 6 or more pockets to see where I had left my money the night before! Sometimes I didn’t have the money, as it was in the pockets of the previous day’s trousers. As with keys, it took me an inordinate amount of time to settle on a particular pocket for my money, and even now, I can still be caught out when I leave my wallet in a coat, a pair of trousers or in the wrong place in the house.

These days my third and final item is my phone to contact people and count my steps in the main. I wondered what the equivalent was in my childhood and I decided that there simply wasn’t one. Perhaps I would have change for the telephone box or I might have a calculator if I was off to school. A notebook and pen were a must if I thought I might need to take notes about something. A torch would be in my pocket on scout camp. A phone has replaced all of them.

As I was never a smoker I never had the concealed packets of cigarettes and box of matches some of my friends had. During the Autumn and Spring terms I would have gloves because I have always run on a different thermostat setting to everyone else! Finally, I would put all the rubbish from sweets, sticker packets and crisp packets etc in my pockets to dispose of when I got home. The problem was that I often forgot to do that and ended up with coat pockets bulging with rubbish until I remembered. Actually, some things never change!!