Grrr. It Makes Me Moderately Cross

Regular readers of this blog, of which there are few, often ask me: "Graham, why haven't you been updating your blog? Is the world no longer lovely?"

The truth is, I've been busy. Very busy. About as busy as Grant Bovey's bodyguard on Beat The Crap Out Of An Idiot For Charity Day (May 7, in case you're interested).

But I told somebody important that I write an amusing blog, so I suppose I'd better keep up the pretense for a few weeks on the off-chance he checks. If you wouldn't mind keeping schtum on the subject, I'd be grateful.

I've been marginally frustrated by something lately. I won't go into details. This isn't one of those confessional blogs. I'm not going to be played by Billie Piper on ITV2 or anything like that. I'm not even sure I can tell you how much I've been frustrated.

Actually, I can. Remember trying to get the silver paper off an old-style Kit-Kat that had been just that little bit too close to your cup of tea? About that frustrating.

This is why there's so much knife crime. Youngsters today don't have the petty grief chaps like me had. They don't get the training in minor frustration.

They don't have the five-minute wait for a Sinclair ZX Spectrum game to load, followed by a crash right at the end.

If you wanted to see a woman's lady bumps in colour, you had to watch late-night BBC2 or Channel 4. Even now subtitles make me come over all peculiar. If I ever went deaf, I'd need a wheelchair.

But today it's all instant gratification. Oh, yes it is. Pick a random teenager off the street and tell him to his face that you had to rewind a video cassette before you watched it and they'll look at you as if you're mad. Have a go! Tell me I'm wrong. I've tried it with about 30 randomly selected teenagers on the street. Some of them were quite rude.

It's easy to blame the internet, but, of course, it's not a recent invention. It existed in medieval times, albeit considerably slower than the current version.

Monks would stand at the top of hills shouting "Zero! One! One! Zero," while a second monk would take note of these binary codes and convert them into characters which he would inscribe into a book. This monk was known as the browser monk, or Friar Fox.

Downloading a movie took ages. The browser monk would have to draw the scene described by the shouting monks in the corner of a book, and when, years later, the 'movie' was finished, he would flick through the pages, effecting a rudimentary animation.

And it was still quicker than Orange Broadband.