A Woman and Her Adventures

As my fourteen year old self sat on a busy train to Belfast, trying not to look anyone in the eye and praying to God that no one would sit beside me an old man got on the train. A very old man. And of course he sat down beside me. I smiled at him and he smiled back before I was absorbed back into my, super cool at the time, blackberry phone. A few minutes past when I could feel him looking over my shoulder. He asked “what is that?”, and for a moment my young brain could not comprehend the idea that anyone on the planet would not know what a mobile phone was. I smiled and explained that it was a phone and you could go on the internet, take photographs and send text messages to people. He expressed his wonder at this, but what perplexed him most seemed to be the small size of the phone. He began to tell me a story about his life during the war. He had worked with Morse code machines which, he explained, used to be the size of a desk. Then one day he came in to work and there was ...