New Age Man

What an age we live in. We can make almost instant contact with anyone , just about anywhere in the world, at the press of a button. Because of fly casting I have people I regard as friends all over the world, even though we may never have met in the flesh. The problem is it is sometimes too easy. You email each other constantly over a relatively, and historicaly, short period and it can soon become a chore to reply, chore in the sense that you are all out of thoughts, not a chore because you are fed up with them. In the ‘good old days’ it was letters, not emails. To receive a letter was exciting and to write a reply was enjoyable. You didn’t have to worry that their reply was in your face before you even had the chance to turn the computer off. I used to work abroad, in pre computer days, and it was a treat to get letter’s from home. It’s not the same with an email is it?

 But, the computer does have it’s benefits, this blog wouldn’t exist without it, for one. A lot of resourses would only be available with a lot of effort in digging them up but now we just Google a question and up pops hundreds of options. It allows us to do things on the spur of the moment we might otherwise have had more time to consider and, probably, not do if we had had more time to think about it. For instance; we once had a thread running on Sexyloops about the viscosity of air and I suddenly thought ‘Ross Brawn’, I mean, who would know more about that subject than a man involved if a sport like F1, I had even bumped into him at a fly show (almost literally) , we had shared a glance. He had even moved to BAR and was designing Jenson Buttons new car. I emailed him, asked him the question and also pleaded with him to give Jenson a decent car. He never replied, but I know he received it because Jenson now has a fantastic car. I also locked eyes with Dame Kiri Takanawa at the same show, she never writes either.

 It’s a sobering thought that a lot of us wouldn’t be where we are today without the Internet, I wonder where we would be? I wouldn’t be sitting here for a start, neither would you be sitting there either. Perhaps we would be out doing something else instead, like fishing, for instance.