The older I get, the less I assume that people know what I'm talking about. If you are as old as I am you can skip the next bit. I won't go as far back as the textile industry and the skilled handworkers who feared for their livelihoods when the first machines were introduced that would replace them. Over the centuries now, since the Industrial Revolution, we know that people have feared (and rightly so) that new technologies would take their place. These days, the term Luddite has evolved to include anyone opposed to or slow to adapt to new trends, including me/us. We feel sorry for ourselves as the human touch and especially the human voice has been replaced by buttons. You know what I'm talking about.

If you have a complaint about a product or a service you have to take an hour or two out of your day and pay close attention to what you are told to do:

1) If you need technical advice, press 1;

2) If you want to check your account, press 2;

3) If you just want to talk, hang up.

I often think it must be very difficult for a mistress to have voice contact with her lover if she had to follow the instructions. Maybe he has a special line:

1) If you are his wife and need him to bring home some Extra Virgin Olive Oil, press 1;

2) if you're his daughter and need more money before Friday, press 2 urgently;

3) If you're his mistress, lick your finger before you press the button, you know which one.

But I digress. I just wanted to say I am no Luddite. I have a website and a blog to prove it. However, I do not indulge in Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, YouTube or Pinterest. I have a number of insomniac friends who do, and I get their catch of the day every morning, ranging from cute kittens and lolling dogs to the far-flung beauty of the earth to terrible puns and wordplay. What did they do before this wealth of irrelevance?

What does anyone do? I blog.

It's so nice you can lick the air. I just want to express my thanks to The Management for the lovely weather because I have been complaining and grumbling lately. We're all like puppy dogs: happy in the sunshine, whimpering when we're cold or wet or put upon.

Do you find, as you get older, that you have total recall? About the past, that is. You probably have trouble finding your car keys, if you don't have ONE place to put them, but if someone drops a name, a place or an action, or refers to some past event, you're off and running with more details than you knew you had in you. You have to be careful not to wear out your audience and not to overkill with too much detail and also - for heaven's sake - do not repeat yourself. My advice to you is to write it all down. You'll be grateful for it later and you won't turn people off with your verbosity. I'm a great fan of paper.

Sometimes I have picked up a piece of paper with a few lines on it or perhaps a short poem, and I liked what I saw and wondered who wrote that. ( I usually give credit for what I quote.) Then I realized, hey, I wrote that! What a delicious discovery. It doesn't last, of course. Nothing does. But glimpses like that give me hope. The American writer Joan Didion (The Year of Magical Thinking) compared those bits of paper to collected pieces of string. Each length is too short to keep or too long to throw away but if they're rolled together, on top of one another as they accumulate, in time they add up to a sizeable ball, albeit useless. Maybe a cat could play with it. But your ball of paper, or wad, or pile, whatever - your paper - each with its little Thought for the Day, now that's better than a ball of string, and it's all yours. Nice thought.

You can tell I'm feeling more optimistic, can't you?