Disappearing remotes, lost mobiles and drones

Country Living with Francis Farragher

A COUPLE of weeks back in the space of a few minutes, I had a conversation with a New Zealander, where we exchanged views about climate and weather.

Ok, it wasn’t a real conversation but we said all we had to say via a few emails and I acknowledged that the crafty Kiwi, known to one and all as weatherman Ken Ring, had posted me on his latest Weather Almanac for Ireland.

That’s all pretty incidental, but in one of those Eureka moments, I nearly had to pinch myself. Here I was, a child of the 1960s, where half middling shoes and a bad bike, was as good as it got, having a chat with someone on the other side of the world.

I take it absolutely for granted that within seconds I can get a reply from my daughter in Beijing either by Skype, text or Whats App and at the touch of a few buttons on an IPhone, I can access information and news right across the world.

Of course, all of this doesn’t mean that if you’re tired at night that you don’t need to go to bed or that one of those gadgets will ever replace a bawdy pub discussion on good or bad turf, but over the course of 50 years we have come a long way in terms of technology.

The other night, there was another of those ongoing mini-crisis situations when the remote for the television could not be found and in its absence, there was the greatest of probing to get the TV turned on.

It is only like yesterday (that means probably well over 30 years ago) when I visited a cousin’s house and saw the first version of a remote control. In fact, it wasn’t a full-blooded remote at all, as it was linked to the television by a long stretch of wire.

But boy, was this a proud household. The wire stretched back from the television to the couch, all of eight or nine feet away, and the channels (probably just two of them) could be changed, the volume adjusted and the device switched off. This sure was one cool dude.

There was a Christmas too, back in the early 1980s, when frustrated by years of parental refusal to purchase anything other than a half banjaxed black and white television with a dodgy aerial, I ventured into Tuam with no money but a good credit rating and landed out with a spanking new Luxor colour TV . . . and yes, it had a remote control, with no wires attached.

For that festive season with my new TV and remote, I felt a bit like Daffyd Thomas in Little Britain — the only gay in the village — but alas, shortly after, there was a rash of colour televisions along the road, with remote controls that could do more than my one could. But for one glorious week, I was the technology whizz kid along the road.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.