The Death of the Book
There are so many things that I miss now that our offspring have left home for greener pastures
When HeeHoo and I got married our entire family lived in Zimbabwe but now sadly we are the only two left.
Sunday lunches once used to be riotous ...grannies, grandpas, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers sisters, nieces and nephews.
We would all sit down to Charlie's magnificent roast potatoes, seven sorts of veggies and a giant roast or two, often farm grown lamb, succulent roast chicken and always a piece of prime beef.
But now Sundays are different, very different, HeeHoo and I balk against the thought of just the two of us sitting at each end of the giant family table, and besides we gave up roast potatoes on the advice of Dr Atkins, and so if we are in town, we stumble down to the Bon usually for a peri peri chicken and salad.
But don't get me wrong...I am not asking for your pity...(sob)...what I am really getting at is ... although I miss every single thing about the children ......I DO NOT MISS THEIR MUSIC !!
I must confess Mother used to say awful things to me about my penchant for Beatles music...but have you actually ever listened to a piece of MODERN rap "music". I hesitate to call it music because music is supposed to at least be....WELL .... musical !!
Songs are supposed to rhyme and be pleasing to the ear ...but RAP is just downright disgusting. There is a fellow out there called Eminem who quite takes my breath away with his amazing command of the English language. His vocabulary is peculiarly stinted, he only knows THE four letter word and anything that rhymes with THE four letter word !!
I guess it must stem back to his education, maybe his teachers neglected to read him any of the beautiful poetry that our teachers read to us. Poems like Longfellow's "Hiawatha" books with the most mellifluous language like "The Wind in the Willows".
And he has obviously never heard of iambic pentameter, that's for sure. The only blessing is his own version of ebonics is so hard to hear as one gets older that much of his rhythmic mysteries sound like total gobbledygook !!
The disturbing thing about this apparent lack of education leads me to think about "book larnin" as they used to say.
Now my youngest child tells me that books will soon be a thing of the past. They will become obsolete rather like those LP records we all have faithfully stored away in the hope that we might be able to sell them on e bay one day.
Pretty soon people will be describing the word "book" to their grandchildren, because they will have never ever seen one !!
Books of course will be replaced by all things electronic, think about it, Heehoo studiously devours his daily newspaper , his periodicals, his Mac magazines, his fishing magazine, his golf magazine and his favourite magazine "The Week" which is a condensation of the weeks worth of worthy newspapers.
But do you ever see a youngster with a newspaper or book in hand unless it is a school book Oh no .... they are pouring over their laptops and digesting each and every word on the internet !!
I myself am also falling prey to these new fangled gadgets...it is after all much easier to call up Google, scroll down on my bookmarks to my favourite daily rag...make the font MUCH bigger so I don't need to look for my specs, and digest in a flash the news headlines of the day, occasionally calling in on a longer interesting article once my interest has been piqued.
The entire news media is in fact under threat I am told, pretty soon no one will ever read a newspaper, few people will turn on the telly, even fewer will turn on a radio ...all you will ever need to know will be encapsulated in the little computer of yours.
The search engines that are available to electronic media lovers make life so easy that there is no need to go out of your door for one second in order to be totally electronically entertained 24 hours a day .
Your music is there on your computer, type in a song or story Play your games, read your books, watch your movies type in any line or a phrase and google will find it for you in a flash.
Now good must come out of anything I suppose, think of all those trees we will be saving when no one reads books any longer !!
WATCHDOG
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