The old age bus is coming to pick me up

Oh dear, oh dear. Here comes the old age bus, and there’s a seat with my name on it.

I fight back, but technology stands behind me, waving a big stick, chasing me aboard as I scream for a child – any child – to come and rescue my e-mail, my computer, my life.

It started when I updated my old desktop computer, and my e-mail was immediately killed, crushed to death as it was dragged through a time-space portal into the present day.

No one knew how to fix it, not even a team of renegade young people who haven’t yet learnt that tech is the devil’s work. Your computer’s too old, they told me, as if I’ve got a pile of cash or bitcoin or whatever lying around to buy a new one.

However, I do have a laptop, so all by myself I set up the old e-mail on it. See, I can do technology.

Then I gave a new work contact my e-mail address. He giggled. The ’90s want their e-mail address back, he said.

I didn’t dare admit I still have a Hotmail address too, and I treasure it like I do original vinyl that still bears the ’80s price tag, proving I was hip before the hipsters.

However, my e-mail has now died again, presumably suicide.

It sends out the odd bleating missive into the ether, a rigor mortis of sorts, but receives nothing. Incoming messages are surely piling up unseen in some analogue graveyard; that’s probably where all my book deals and film contracts have got to. But what to do?

Get a Gmail address, say my children. But, I say, but… But what? But, THE MAN! What about The Man? Isn’t Gmail the very seat of power for The Man?

Oh, laughs the oldest, you think those ancient e-mail addresses of yours with their defunct servers are more secure than The Man?

You could store stuff online, suggests the younger guy encouragingly. Use the cloud.

I pat the USB stick in my pocket: I’m not trusting anything to a cloud. So I tell my know-it-all offspring how I e-mail important stuff to my Hotmail address, which stores it online.

They fall about laughing. That is exactly what the cloud does, they tell me: it stores stuff online.

Exhausted, I clamber aboard the waiting bus. It’s only as it speeds off that I realise it’s one of those modern, driverless things.

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