The Best of the Silver Surfers

My first big trip pretty much coincided with widespread usage of email.

I’d write great long emails home and my Dad would collect them, print them off and share them with my Mother.  The occasional large print version would get provided to my Gran.

I started Skyping home when I first had internet installed in my little one room flat on Quang Trung. Somewhat frazzled by the ongoing dramas at KOTO it was great not just to talk to my Mum and Dad but see them as well.

For a number of years my Mother has been promising herself, myself and my Dad that she was going to master the internet.  She didn’t want much, just to be able to search for things for the garden and to look at cottages to rent when they had a few days away.

She is of a generation that didn’t just had to master computers.  She first had to master a keyboard, then a mouse or trackpad.  To most of us the idea of cut and pasting is second nature and yet every step had to be learnt. She talked of doing courses but there were very few out there that start at the very beginning.

But after Christmas last year we started getting tentative, short emails from my Mum that had obviously taken a while to type.  My Dad, enjoying his iPad, decided that my Mum would be more suited to using one too.  There have been great strides since.

I’m rather proud of her when she “likes” thing on Facebook. It makes me giggle when I see her following her gardening heart throb Monty Don on Twitter alongside cousin Vicky’s Vallum Farm, the Hexham Courant and the Hairy Bikers. Occasionally, I’ll know she’s still out there when she favourites a tweet of mine or joins in communal nagging of me with Loan.

My Dad shares pictures taken from his phone of my nieces and nephews via a family only G+ circle and I try to remember to do the same.  Holiday photos are shared as they’re taken. Essentially postcards several times a day.  Meanwhile we normally get a text at the weekend with a request for a Skype chat where Loan and I mock bicker in front of them about which was of us is the most hard done to.

The football season starts this weekend and via SMS, Viber or Google Chat I’ll be sending goal updates to my Dad and, most likely, interrupting his bowls.

I enjoy it all immensely.  Just as I enjoy sharing a little of my life via this blog.  I can’t imagine being without these tools now and I’m very proud of my “silver surfers” back home.