COLIN HOGG

We still have one of those old-fashioned landline telephones connected at our place, though I’m not sure why anymore. Hardly anyone rings us on it and if they do, it’s mainly our mothers.

If anyone else calls, it’s often one of those dodgy people from the other side of the world trying to get into our personal details so they can rob us. They’re usually not very convincing, thank goodness – like the chap who rang me the other day. “I am from internet security,” he announced in a foreign and faraway voice.

“Are you really?” I said. “Someone is controlling the Wi-Fi in your area,” he said.

“What area’s that then?”

He didn’t have an answer for that because he didn’t know. He just wanted to get into my computer.

“You should be ashamed,” I told him, rising to the occasion. “I don’t know how you can look your family in the eye. Your mother would weep if she knew you were a thief.”

Then I hung up. They never ring back. There must be some international code of conduct for internet thieves.

But we’re getting a couple of those sorts of calls every week now and they’re not as much fun as they used to be. And if it’s not the stealers calling up on our old-fashioned phone, it’s the survey people asking if I have 15 minutes to answer some questions about my supermarket habits.

So I’m thinking we might get rid of the dear old landline and try to persuade our mothers to ring us on

COLIN’S READY TO RING OUT THE OLD AND RING IN THE NEW

our mobiles instead. Texting is out of the question for my mother, who never embraced the computer age and resists it to this day, though the occasional email does get through.

But it does seem that a lot of the old ways of doing stuff are disappearing, some of them quite swiftly. Proper old-style mail hardly even exists now. I do my best to support the letter-sending system, but it’s hard to find mailboxes to post things in.

The last mailbox left our suburb more than a year ago. The world, as my mother would say, is not what it used to be − and not necessarily for the better, according to her.

I don’t mind the changes so much. It’s not all bad. For instance, I’ve recently discovered that you can buy stamps at the supermarket. Ours even used to have a handy mailbox outside, until they took that one away too. When I mentioned the disappeared mailbox to the check-out assistant, she said nobody put anything in them anymore, except at Christmas.

Soon it won’t matter because we’ll all forget how to write without a keyboard or a touch screen anyway. Handwriting will go the way of darning and fruit preserving. It will all be quite marvellous in a sad sort of way.

I look forward to all sorts of technological excitements, but I’ll probably skip some of it. I don’t, for instance, want an electric car the size of a chilly bin and I’m not tempted to whiz about on an electric scooter or a power-assisted bike. On the other hand, I can’t wait for the robot lawnmower.