Oh, Flora, I haven't felt so old since Jenn said she'd never heard of a Party Six!

<Added>

Party Seven. Blimey, now the memory's going, too.

LOL!!! Sorry

Should hasten to say, I am not THAT young. In case I'm coming across as some kind of wunderkind.

Mostly I feel very old in communication terms. My children are the digital natives - child one could type long before he could write, and they could both use a mouse and surf the internet themselves by the age of two.

They could both use skype before they could make a phone call, and child two is three and a teeny bit and is already a pro with a finger-pad mouse, and knows the difference between right click and left click and how to work an ipad.

It's v odd when you think I used to play the kind of computer games that you loaded up on a tape cassette, and you had to sit there for 30 mins listening to it squeak and whine and burble at you in hexidecimal. My children look at me like I'm crazy when I say that computers didn't used to have a mouse, and early monitors were monotone. I might as well be telling them I got put up chimneys and ate dinosaur steaks.

Surfing at two? Skypeing at three? Crikey.

I might as well be telling them I got put up chimneys and ate dinosaur steaks.

Lol, this reminds me of Jeremy Hardy on QI once. The question was 'What is the name of the earliest soup?' And he suggested 'Cream of Plesiosaur?'

Jan, that made me laugh hugely!

I know, it's one of those things that makes laughter bubble up inside me whenever I think of it.

A bit like the van that's often parked outside its owner's house in the next road from me. It's emblazoned with the legend 'Decorating by Clarkson' and the mental image this produces never fails to amuse me. I think it must do the same for other people which is why he and his van are so often at home.

And on the subject of the difficulty of etc. etc. I am currently reading 'The Go-Between', a story that would have been rendered redundant by the invention of email. Unless the net went down, and Leo had to smuggle a laptop into the Hall so that Marian could read the message right off the screen.

Has anyone else been frustrated by the ease of communication of the 21st century when writing a story set in the here and now?

Yes!! It happens to me quite often.

Damn all these instant devices to Hell!

How funny. Towards the end of the book, now set in the 50s, is this snippet:

'I sometimes telephone . . . What a boon it is. Was there a telephone here in your day?'
'No,' I replied. 'It might have made a great difference if there had been.'

Indeed.

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Thanks for this interesting stuff..

i think it can be difficult. But when I came across this problem in my initial outline, and chose to put my characters up high in the mountains of North Wales.where there \are no mobile signals. I have also found that when I've been on holiday there (North Wales); there are no signals in some of the remote valleys either.
Maybe people who live in different places in Britain know where there are other places that have little or no signals. Good luck.

Glyn

I was reading this thinking, "How odd, this has never been a problem for me, I wonder why." Then I realised - neither Sam or Molly were old enough to have a mobile phone (Sam is 11 and Molly 9, and yes, I know, children have mobile phones from 4 and a half now, but they were young enough that it was plausible for them not to.) My current MC is 10, also doesn't have one, and Isabel lived in the fourteenth century.

Problem solved.

Sam does use the internet, but the sort of questions he's interested in aren't easily Googleable. Molly lives with her grandparents, who don't have it.