Keeping in touch with family and technology

I HATE technology. However, with a brother in Australia and family littered around this country like crisp packets, I realised it was time to invest in Skype.

Now when I say invest, I don’t mean financially — the whole thing is free — I mean emotionally, ie get off my backside, do something about keeping in touch with my nephew Down Under and face this technology thingy head on.

Skype, for all you lucky people who live within commuting distance of your nearest and dearest, is a computer package which allows you to make free phone/webcalls to whoever you wish around the globe.

This means that not only can you speak to others you can also see them — via a webcam — clear as you like on your computer.

This free communication system inevitably saves you a small fortune, as my last phone bill proved. Not having bothered to download skype at that time, I got a £50 bill for a quick call to Oz. I wasn’t best pleased.

Hence the hours spent downloading all the paraphernalia needed to communicate effectively with one’s family members.

While other, more technologically advanced folk , and I am even including my mother in this category, have been able to set up this Skype malarky without sweat and/or tears, four hours of hell later I finally succeeded.

Clearly on this very lap top there is a camera in the computer which even to a dunce like me means there is a camera in the computer, but I couldn’t make it work.

I have searched the whole computer looking for an “on” button and bar taking a sledgehammer to it there is nothing doing.

So I bought a new camera and installed it, which took an indeterminate amount of time, which as a mother of a two-year-old is something I have very little of.

Hours later we were sat with the camera pointing at the whole family, waiting — the little one hitting the keyboard with increasing frustration — when suddenly in front of us was my brother and my nephew. In glorious Technicolor.

We talked for an hour, we swopped tales and shared stories. We showed pictures and new toys that the children had acquired, we turned the camera on our vegetable patch and new fencing and we saw the harbour bridge and the sun shining outside my brothers window.

I love technology, don’t you?