He says, she says
INCREASINGLY, WE ACTUALLY KNOW NOTHING! Britain’s best-loved couple Eamonn Holmes & Ruth Langsford talk us through this week’s news...
EAMONN: I’ll admit it – I’m a pretty useless individual. There’s very little I can do that my father did, and most of my four brothers can do – and it’s not something that makes me feel in any way good. I’m talking about skills that I never had and, presumably, never will. I’ve never hung a single strip of wallpaper, for instance, and the thought of any constructive manual labour brings me out in hives! But at least I can wire a plug, and change a car wheel.
RUTH: Not sure he can even do those – but he has other uses, I suppose! Oddly enough, looking at a recently published list of ‘dying arts’, it turns out that it’s not that many of us can’t do things, it’s just that technology and changing times means that we don’t do things. For instance, I can read a compass, knit and even tie knots. My army Mum and Dad were very good teachers.
EAMONN: I can make a fire from scratch, know proper grammar, I can spell and write letters – all of which are listed in the top 20 of those dying arts. But there is no chance on God’s Earth of me assembling a set of drawers from Ikea, or anywhere else. I’m not sure if that’s really a lack of skill, or just rebelling against doing a job that some manufacturer should have done for me. But the warning for all of us is that more
of us have fewer skills to hand down to future generations. Search engines like Google take away the need for children to ask questions and interact. We will rely more on artificial intelligence and technology. All of which sounds fantastic – until it goes wrong, that is… But then again, so could tree-climbing!
‘Some of us can do things, we just don’t’ Ruth