My wife was trying to contact our daughter in Australia, but she wasn’t answering her phone, so she rang Cooper, my grandson, instead. He’s 12 and he recently got his own mobile.

He answered, and they had a brief chat before he handed the phone to his mam. My wife, Gaye, told Cooper how exciting it was that he had his own telephone, and she’d be able to contact him anytime she wanted.

As he passed the phone to his mam, Cooper threw his eyes to heaven and shook his head. “Nana is calling this a telephone,” he said.

His younger brother, Toby, was sitting at the table minding his own business when he suddenly piped up, “Is that from the old days?”

He was spot on of course. It was from the old days, and so are we.

It was another reminder, if one was needed, that we are getting older. Our grandchildren see us as we saw our own grandparents when we were children. Just like Bart’s grampa in The Simpsons. Old, bothered, forgetful, and cranky, and it still surprises me at how quickly we got to this point.

But the grandchildren don’t know the half of it. There was a time, and it really doesn’t seem that long ago, when to make a phone call, we had to leave the house and go to the nearest telephone box with a fistful of coins.

Sometimes, there could be a queue, and regardless of the weather, you had to join it, even in the rain.

The misery didn’t always........

© Evening Echo