Oysters on London transport, self-service tills in supermarkets that evidently a great many customers object to, twitters, tweeters, Ipods, Iphones, whatever next? Evidently the king of the twitters, or is it tweeters, has a following of over one and a half million hanging on his every word. Stephen Fry follows up with about a million. I wonder how many people read my Blog. A dozen maybe? I wouldn’t know a twitter from a tweeter and I have never even seen an Ipod let alone owned one. Our mobile phones are antiques now and do not play games, switch on to the internet and perform all the other marvels of which the new ones are capable. Technology is moving much to fast for this Luddite. I simply can’t keep up. Evidently one of the reasons customers object to with the new self-service tills is the lack of human contact. Not all the girls at the checkout counter are a barrel of laughs but there are some who still serve with a smile and a thank you and this lack of contact spreads beyond the supermarket counter. People sit in trains and buses engrossed in their gadgets, fingers tapping merrily away but then what’s new? In olden days the Englishman when travelling and in order to avoid contact hid behind his copy of The Times. Dining at one of our local restaurants one evening I watched a large family at a table nearby, one of whose young sons had a console in which he was engrossed to such an extent he was no longer a part of that family. He ignored his food and his body language was such that he was even half turned away from the table. The rest of the family: laughing, joking, chatting away, contacting with each other, ignored him as much as he was ignoring them and this I found rather sad.
The Greek hunting season has been brought to a close two months earlier because evidently men are still hunting in areas devastated by fires and are taking no notice of the order to desist while nature attempts to re-establish herself. There are thousands of registered hunters in the country and it is of course a multi-million euro industry what with guns, ammunition, magazines, clothing and so forth but really there should be a moratorium for a couple of years or all wild life will cease to exist. Goodness only knows what’s left at the moment, not much I fear. They would do nature a big favour if they played with their Iphones, their Ipods and their computers rather than their shotguns but of course that will never happen.