My daughter Matilda came round on the weekend to say happy birthday and she told me tales of what a jungle it is to be at secondary school. If you're advancing in years and feeling down about how old you're becoming, there's nothing better as a pick-me-up than to hear how terrifying and awful it is to be a teenage girl.
Aside from the pettiness, the nastiness, and the sheer viciousness of them all, they're also incredibly vain and self-obsessed. A bit like me with this fat diary. But worse.
In my day there were no phones. Taking a picture and seeing it instantly only happened with polaroids, and they were a novelty. There was no social media and when you communicated with people it was usually face-to-face and virtually never recorded. The polar opposite of social media now, which essentially provides a transcript of every interaction.
You forget what it was like before the tech. Once the tech hits, and makes everything more convenient, you simply forget what it was like without it.
For a dieting fat man, not having instant access to photos of yourself that can be transferred all over the world in a fraction of a second - well, that has the ring of bliss to it as a notion, doesn't it? How times have changed.
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