I feel a right tweet... trumped by a digital age!

DID you hear about the couple who decided to get married when they were 85? They spent the honeymoon trying to get out of their car.

Then there was the other couple, aged 87, who wanted a divorce.

But why did you wait until now to look for advice on getting divorced?

We wanted to wait until the children were dead.

Yes, they’re ageist jokes. But I can tell them with impunity because I too am decrepit and useless and I need to remind myself to leave the computer on 24/7 in case I might suddenly get an urge in the middle of the night to sit and compose some gloriously inspirational text.

But I know I won’t because I’m technologically illiterate, and I’m not on my own there as there are thousands of us.

At this moment the figure is 300,000, and over the next 30 years the OAPs in Ireland will increase to 1.4 million, most of them like me.

You see, my fingers are too big for even the biggest mobile phone, or for the smaller tablet. Newspaper print has been reduced to less than tiny beyond measurement for your average pensioner. It now appears as tiny black smudges on startling white paper. All these things combine to frustrate, embarrass, and annoy.

It was bad enough when the first answering machines took over and a dead mechanical voice said ‘press 1 for haberdashery, press 2 for ladies underwear and press 3 for toilet rolls!

Having failed to put us in touch with the person we want to talk to they have the cheek to actually ask you for your opinion on the answering service.

That was bad enough and then along came texting, messaging, mailing, sms, Facebook and Donald Trump’s favourite form of communicating, Twitter.

For the elderly apart from the mechanical difficulties we also have to cope with the process of communicating digitally in a world that has concern only for the future and has almost abandoned the past.

It starts with the manuals that accompany phones, computers, and other information vehicles. It seems to me that they brought in a translator from Ulan Bator to write the manuals in the densest English conceivable.

This confusion is also known as code. Everything is written in code now-adays and while this information is invaluable to the modern punter, it’s a scar and an abomination on the souls of us, the ancient, but undead.

It’s not so long ago that many people in Ireland were functionally illiterate.

We have just about caught up with modern communications until the explosion of digital technology blew a hole in our system.

Now what has happened is that digital technology has usurped a simple skill of reading into gobbledygook, incomprehensible to the larger population.

THERE are 500,000 people who are still not connected to broadband. They are the lucky ones so. They still deal in the old currency of mutual respect and conversation between the buyer and the seller.

For us oldies though, something as simple as buying a book on the net requires a degree in maths, a masters in English and a PhD in logic.

I’m happy this very day to tell of a glimmer of hope I saw this past week.

My one-and-a-half-year-old grandchild was playing a game on her father’s mobile phone.

After playing intensely for quite a while she deftly hit the off button, put the phone down and went back to playing with her sister.

I know it’s not much but it could be the start of a revival.