Life’s simple pleasures are now more complicated

Gone are the days when Rab had to sit on his roof to get the best signal for his radio, but it seems he just can’t get his head around the HD TVs and other gadgets that are meant to make life easier

Icannot be the only one who pines for a time when life was simpler. I know it’s a cliché. Life wasn’t simpler in the past, just more dull.

Compare all the distractions we have now to, say, the Middle Ages, when the family would gather round in the sitting-room and watch the tapestry together.

But today’s gadgets are discombobulating me terribly.

Instance one: digital radios. I’d an early model and it was hopeless. It didn’t even have Radio Scotland on it. It had a Gaelic channel instead, with someone having decided: “That’ll do for the jocks.”

It was also fussy about where you put it and made demented squawking noises, like a crow having a tantrum, if it wasn’t happy. I seem to remember I’d to put mine on the roof and sit up there with it when I wanted to listen to anything. Awful business when it rained.

And they haven’t gotten any better. Staying at a friend’s recently, I discovered there wasn’t even an off-on switch on their digital radio.

How terribly postmodern (and, no, I don’t know what that means).

Tuning was also impossible. There were no dials like in pre-digital days. I guess the beast had to be “programmed”. But I also had the feeling that, rather than me being in charge of the radio, the radio was in charge of me.

You don’t have a feeling of being in control with these machines. Today, I still listen to a wee portable radio with medium wave on it. Indeed, the medium wave, where the football is, doesn’t sound any worse than FM, which itself was another confusion-inducing revolution back in the day.

Another problem is the telly. I haven’t had a functioning one for a year. I have a set but don’t have a box.

I can watch limited repeats through another wee box, but not regular telly nor the sports channels needed for the footer. I bought a reconditioned box on yon eBay but there was no joy there.

How I pined for the days when you just plugged your telly into an aerial and you were off.

Friends bought a super-duper HDX TV set, which is so sharp it turns movies into over-realistic pictures that look like cheap soap operas. I never understood how the latter had such sharp pictures, like home movies, but actual, proper films had a sort of sheen on them.

But the sheen works. It imparts glamour. Everything else looks amateurish. Films on the new super-HD sets look like these documentaries you get in DVD extras about the making of the film.

It hasn’t the magic of the movie, which reached its apex with old, coloursoaked Technicolor and has been going backward ever since.

There is a setting on the new sets to alter the movie picture but, while it had an effect on one of those tellies, owned by other friends, it had little effect on the one I wanted to watch.

I’m beginning to think that, when it comes to progress, we need to stop marching relentlessly onward and take a few steps back.

Life may or may not have been simpler in the past. But nothing is simple now. Except, arguably, the present writer.