I was talking to my grandson the other night; we were working together on a project. He was 100 kilometers away in another town and so we weren’t actually talking, we were facebooking. Facebooking is what people do these days instead of letter writing or emailing or talking on the phone. My grandkids are all online; cyberspace is the place where I hang out with them. I can be in contact with them from wherever I am in the world and just as involved in their lives albeit on another level.

The boy has long held a dream of being a professional skateboarder and as his doting grandparent; it’s my duty to encourage dreams. The project was to make a short movie that showed his skateboarding to a couple of potential sponsors. Between us and facebook and a few file sharing sites we were able to put the project together within a few hours. He sent me the film he wanted to include, the music he wanted as background and then put his trust in my artistic direction. When I couldn’t load what I thought was the finished project into YouTube, I searched that site and came up with an instructional movie explaining how to convert iMovie into a more generic viewer.

Afterwards I sat back and marveled that the world had changed so much in such a short tune. Not bad for an old granny, I told myself chuckling like an old crone into my keyboard. I never imagined myself as this kind of grandma!

It’s because I grew up in the last century, my romantic vision of myself as a nice little grey haired old granny who lives in a cottage that is always ripe with the smell of cakes baking belongs back there too.That was my grandma. She grew flowers, baked delicious puddings and granted me the absolute freedom to run barefooted through her village and spend long days fishing or idling in a tree with a book in hand. She gardened and read and was gentle, quiet and storybook like in her simple beauty. The world was a slower place back then. We walked everywhere or caught the boat across the harbor. We ate ice cream on Sunday and had time to watch the sunset every night. Grandma would sit every Sunday at her kitchen table to write letters to her daughters, who lived less than 100 kilometers away. The daughters all dutifully wrote back with news of their growing families. I grew up watching this great flow of letters swirl around our family, like a magic circle. Later I wrote to my Grandma and still write now to my aunt, the last remaining link in that chain of time.

Aunt steadfastly refuses to join into classes that will teach her how to email. She thinks that at 85 she is not old enough to join in with old age pensioner schemes and is anyway reluctant to learn new skills. Her brother, younger than her by one year, is connected to the world since he won a computer at the age of 80 and decided to play around with it. I now have a relationship with that Uncle that I have never had before. It’s quite something to come to know someone whom you have known all your life.

As a traveller and a devoted grandma who often must content herself to adoring her grandchildren from afar, the internet has given me an access to the world of their future and something quite remarkable that we can share together. Long live change, it keeps us Grannies on our toes and accelerating into their future.