Which outdated technology do you miss the most, and why?
The answer may surprise you, because it isn’t an old gadget or a forgotten piece of kit.
It’s letters.
Not because I’m against email. Far from it. Email is brilliant at what it does. It’s instant, searchable and gets the job done. When Adam from HR or Tom from Accounts needs last quarter’s numbers by 3pm, you don’t reach for a fountain pen and a sheet of A4.
But somewhere along the way, convenience quietly replaced something much more personal.
I joined the Army in the 1990s, before smartphones, social media and the internet became part of everyday life. Back then, one of the biggest highlights of the week was mail call.
It wasn’t just about hearing your name.
It was knowing that someone had sat down, found the time, and written to you. Every envelope was different. Different handwriting. Different paper. Sometimes there were photographs folded inside. Sometimes childish drawings. Sometimes a pressed flower, a train ticket or some other little keepsake that meant nothing to anyone else but everything to you.
And then there were the things technology still can’t replicate.
You can’t spray an email with her favourite perfume.
You can’t instantly recognise who’s written before you’ve even opened it because of the handwriting on the envelope.
And you certainly don’t get the entertainment of trying to decipher handwriting so spectacularly bad it needs its own translator.
A letter had character. It had imperfections. It had fingerprints, creases and coffee stains. It had travelled hundreds or even thousands of miles before it landed in your hands.
An email arrives exactly as it left.
A letter arrives with a story.
I still have letters tucked away in boxes that are over thirty years old. Every now and then I’ll stumble across one, unfold it and be transported straight back to that moment. I can’t say the same for emails buried somewhere in an inbox with 1,800 unread messages.
Technology has given us incredible ways to stay connected. We can video call someone on the other side of the world in seconds. We can send photos instantly. We can share our lives in real time.
That’s progress, and I wouldn’t want to lose it.
But I do think we’ve sacrificed a little of the human touch in the process.
Sometimes the slow way was the better way.
Not because it was more efficient, but because it reminded us that the person on the other end had invested something you can’t download or automate.
Time.
And perhaps that’s the bit of old technology I miss the most.
Not because I have a wall full of certificates, or because I’m forever signing up for courses, but because life has a habit of reminding me just how much I still don’t know.
The older I get, the less interested I become in being right all the time.
I’d much rather understand.
That might sound like a small distinction, but I think it’s an important one.
Learning isn’t just about collecting facts. It’s about allowing new experiences to reshape old opinions. It’s about listening to people whose lives are completely different from your own and being willing to admit they might have something valuable to teach you.
Some of the greatest lessons I’ve learned haven’t come from classrooms at all.
They’ve come from raising children.
From loving someone.
From making spectacular mistakes.
From living with autism long before I understood I was autistic.
From photography, where standing still and really looking at the world often reveals beauty everyone else walked straight past.
And, of course, from books.
Books have introduced me to worlds I’ll never visit, people I’ll never meet, and ideas that have quietly changed the way I see life.
One of those ideas comes from the Buddha.
Whether you see Buddhism as a religion or simply a philosophy, there’s something deeply refreshing about the idea that we’re all works in progress.
The Buddha didn’t really teach that life should be comfortable.
He taught that it could be understood.
The Four Noble Truths ask us to look honestly at suffering instead of pretending it isn’t there. The Eightfold Path isn’t a quick fix or a self-help slogan. It’s a lifelong practice of becoming a little wiser, a little kinder and a little more compassionate than we were yesterday.
I like that.
Not because I expect to become enlightened.
Let’s be honest—I still lose my patience when technology decides today is the perfect day to update itself.
But because it reminds me that growth isn’t a destination.
It’s a direction.
Too often we think learning stops when school finishes, or when we retire, or when we reach a certain age.
I think that’s when the real education begins.
Every conversation teaches us something.
Every mistake offers a lesson—assuming our pride doesn’t get in the way.
Every challenge asks us whether we’re prepared to adapt or whether we’d rather stay comfortably wrong.
For me, lifelong learning isn’t about becoming the smartest person in the room.
It’s about becoming a slightly better version of the person who walked into it.
If I can go to bed tonight knowing something I didn’t know this morning…
If I can understand another person’s perspective just a little more…
If I can show a little more compassion than I managed yesterday…
What’s one habit that has improved your life the most?
f I had to choose just one habit, it would be meditation.
Not because it gives me all the answers, but because it helps me stop fighting battles that only exist in my own mind.
For a long time, I held onto anger. I replayed conversations, revisited old hurts, and carried resentment far longer than I probably should have. I thought holding on somehow made me stronger or somehow proved I was right.
It didn’t.
It only hurt me.
The people or situations I was angry about often carried on with their lives while I carried the weight. Looking back, it seems like such a waste of energy.
Meditation changed that.
It didn’t erase the past. It simply taught me to observe my thoughts without becoming trapped by them. It reminded me that I always have a choice: hold on or let go.
Most of the time, letting go is the better option.
Not because what happened doesn’t matter, but because my peace matters more.
These days, I still get frustrated. I’m only human. But I no longer give anger a permanent home. I acknowledge it, learn what I can from it, and move forward .
That small daily practice has made me calmer, more patient, and far more present.
Funny really. I started meditating to quiet my mind.
What I discovered was that the greatest benefit wasn’t learning how to be still.
It was learning what was never worth carrying in the first place.
Stay Safe
Bc
Ps here’s a scribble I wrote on this subject some time ago
What’s a chapter of your life you’d title “The Hard Years” — and what got you through it?
If you’ve read my books or been following this blog for a while, you’ll probably know the answer before you’ve finished the question.
Roughly twenty years ago.
That was the chapter.
It was the point where it honestly felt like life had looked at me and thought, “Go on then… let’s see how much this bloke can actually take.”
I was on the verge of homelessness.
I was fighting to have a relationship with my daughters.
My PTSD was running riot.
I was autistic but had absolutely no idea at the time.
And my mental health?
Well… “shot to shit” is probably the most accurate medical diagnosis I can give you.
Let’s unpack that.
After a relationship ended, I found myself with nowhere to live. My family couldn’t help, so I ended up sleeping on the sofa of an old wrestling mate. It wasn’t glamorous, but it beat sleeping rough again.
Eventually she moved in with her boyfriend and we came up with what seemed, at the time, like a sensible solution.
I’d stay in her little council house and carry on paying the rent.
Yes.
I know.
Subletting.
Not exactly legal.
But when your choices are breaking the rules or sleeping rough, morality suddenly becomes a luxury.
While all that was going on, my daughters’ mum had started making contact as difficult as humanly possible.
I’d turn up to collect the girls.
“Oh… we’ve gone out.”
“They’re not here.”
“They don’t want to come.”
The excuses changed.
The result didn’t.
Letters from my solicitor about parental responsibility went unanswered.
Phone calls rarely got through.
And when they did, the girls were apparently never available.
It was only last year that I found out some of the things they’d been told about me growing up.
One of them was that I’d wanted my youngest aborted before she was born.
I hadn’t.
But lies have a habit of hanging around long after the people telling them have moved on.
Looking back now, I understand why I was falling apart.
Back then I just thought I was broken.
Everything piled on top of everything else.
The housing.
The court stuff.
Missing my girls.
The PTSD.
Trying to make sense of a brain that worked differently without knowing why.
So I did what a lot of blokes do when they’re drowning.
I reached for anything that promised five minutes of peace.
Drink.
Drugs.
Self-harm.
None of it fixed anything.
It just delayed having to feel it.
Then came the moment that genuinely broke me.
The council discovered I was living in the house.
I was told that if I cleared about £400 of rent arrears I could take over the tenancy.
I worked every bit of overtime I could.
Paid every penny.
Walked into the meeting convinced I’d finally caught a break.
Instead, I was told I had four weeks to move out.
When I reminded them about what I’d been promised, I was told I’d have to bid on the property along with everyone else.
I’d basically paid someone else’s rent arrears for nothing.
That one hurt.
For the next month I bid on every property I could.
Nothing.
That’s when I hit rock bottom.
I tried (for the first time) to end my life.
I woke up in hospital the following day to two police officers asking why I’d done it and telling me how selfish I’d been for upsetting everyone.
Different times.
Thankfully we’ve moved on a bit since then.
Recovery wasn’t some magical Disney montage.
It took years.
Hospital admissions.
Medication.
Counselling.
Learning how to exist without constantly wanting to disappear.
Then, during one of my final stays in hospital, a member of staff suggested I start writing down how I felt.
I nearly laughed.
Writing a diary?
Really?
I’d grown up believing men dealt with problems by getting on with them.
You certainly didn’t write about your feelings.
Still…
I’d tried almost everything else.
What was one more roll of the dice?
Those first pages weren’t poetry.
They were just chaos.
Anger.
Fear.
Grief.
Questions I didn’t know how to answer.
Slowly, without me really noticing, those pages started changing.
Sentences became verses.
Verses became poems.
Poems became something that made sense of everything that didn’t.
People often ask me what saved my life.
It wasn’t poetry.
Not at first.
Poetry came later.
What saved me was finally giving myself permission to be honest.
The poetry simply gave that honesty somewhere to live.
Without those notebooks there probably wouldn’t have been books.
There wouldn’t have been performances.
There wouldn’t have been conversations with complete strangers who’ve quietly said, “I thought I was the only one.”
There probably wouldn’t be this blog.
So what got me through The Hard Years?
My daughters.
Even when I couldn’t see them, they gave me something to keep fighting for.
Pure bloody-minded stubbornness.
I’ve never liked being told I can’t do something.
And somewhere deep down, underneath everything else, there was still a tiny voice saying,
“Don’t let this be how your story ends.”
Turns out that little voice was right.
Life isn’t perfect now.
It never will be.
But I’ve learned that the hardest chapters aren’t always the end of the book.
Sometimes they’re just the part that explains why the rest of the story matters.
He got so much right that it’s almost unsettling to read today.
The genius of 1984 wasn’t really Big Brother. It wasn’t Room 101, the Thought Police, or even Winston Smith.
It was Orwell’s understanding that power doesn’t just control people.
It controls reality.
Back then, that meant burning books, rewriting newspapers, and dropping inconvenient facts into the Memory Hole.
Today?
I’m not convinced anyone would even bother.
Why erase history when you can simply personalise it?
Imagine an Orwell sequel set in the present day.
Every citizen has a different version of yesterday.
Not because the government rewrote it overnight, but because an algorithm quietly decided which version would keep you engaged.
Your neighbour remembers an event differently because their feed told a different story.
Your parents saw another version.
Your children never saw it at all.
History wouldn’t disappear.
It would fragment.
Truth would become localised.
Debatable.
Optional.
And that’s far more dangerous than censorship.
Because it’s difficult to fight lies when everyone is convinced they’re looking at the facts.
Big Brother would have changed too.
In Orwell’s world, oppression wore a face.
There were posters.
Slogans.
A dictator watching from every wall.
Today’s version wouldn’t need any of that.
Big Brother wouldn’t be a man.
It wouldn’t even be a government.
It would be a seamless partnership between corporations, artificial intelligence and state interests, quietly learning everything about us while insisting it’s all for our convenience.
No boots stamping on faces.
Just terms and conditions we never read.
No compulsory telescreens bolted to our walls.
We’d happily carry them ourselves.
We already do.
Tiny glowing rectangles that know where we are, what we’ve bought, who we talk to, how fast our heart beats, what keeps us awake at three in the morning, and which adverts are most likely to make us click “Buy Now.”
And we’d queue overnight to upgrade them.
The Thought Police wouldn’t arrest you for thinking the wrong thing.
They’d predict what you were likely to think before you knew yourself.
They’d know when you were lonely.
When you were angry.
When you were vulnerable.
Not to protect you.
To market to you.
To influence you.
To gently nudge your decisions until they felt like your own.
The cleverest form of control has never been force.
It’s persuasion disguised as freedom.
That’s what makes Orwell’s world feel less like fiction every year.
The scary part isn’t that 1984 might need a sequel.
It’s that, if Orwell were alive today, he might simply rename it…
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?
For anyone who knows me, you’ll know I come alive when the temperature drops. Give me crisp air, snow-covered landscapes and somewhere I need a proper coat, and I’m a happy man. You can keep the tropical beaches—I start looking for somewhere cooler.
So if I had to choose somewhere to live, it would come down to two places: Norway or Iceland.
Norway will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first adventure Mrs Bob and I took together.
Norway where it all began
It wasn’t just any holiday either.
We found ourselves sailing through the Norwegian Sea during a total solar eclipse. Watching totality from the deck of a ship is one of those moments that reminds you just how spectacular our universe really is. It’s impossible to describe unless you’ve experienced it.
As incredible as that was, it still wasn’t the highlight.
Later, inside the Arctic Circle, we sat for hours simply watching the Northern Lights dance across the sky. No phones. No distractions. Just nature putting on one of the greatest shows on Earth.
Those are the memories that stay with you forever.
An added bonus? Mrs Bob can almost speak the lingo, which would certainly make settling in a lot easier than relying on my Yorkshire charm and enthusiastic hand gestures.
Then there’s Iceland.
Every time I read something new about the country, I find another reason to admire it.
For starters, they’ve mastered something most countries are still trying to figure out: making use of the natural resources they already have.
Geothermal water is pumped directly into homes, providing heating in one of the coldest climates on Earth. Even better, many pavements and sidewalks are heated too, meaning winter doesn’t automatically equal icy paths and broken hips.
Now that’s using common sense.
But what really stands out isn’t the technology.
It’s the attitude.
Following the financial crash in 2008, Iceland took a very different approach from many other countries. Rather than simply rescuing the financial system and moving on, several senior banking figures faced criminal investigations and prosecutions. Whether you agree with every decision or not, it showed a willingness to ask difficult questions about accountability instead of pretending nothing had happened.
Then there’s one of my favourite stories.
In the northern town of Akureyri, after the financial crisis had hit morale, the council fitted heart-shaped filters over the red traffic lights. Instead of glowing red circles, drivers were greeted by glowing red hearts.
It sounds like such a small gesture.
But sometimes small gestures matter the most.
The hearts were there to remind people what was really important and, hopefully, give someone a reason to smile during difficult times.
I love that.
So… Which One?
If you forced me to pick today, I’d probably still struggle.
Norway gave Mrs Bob and me memories we’ll never forget.
Iceland continually impresses me with its ingenuity, resilience and ability to think differently.
Maybe that’s why the answer isn’t really about the country.
On Friday, with a rare day off, I took the opportunity to spend a little time in the garden. I soaked a handful of mealworms before scattering them across the front lawn and topping up the feeders at the bottom of the garden.
It didn’t take long for word to spread through the local bird community.
Over the weekend, I was fortunate enough to have the camera close at hand as a steady stream of familiar faces—and a few welcome surprises—called in to take advantage of the easy meal. There’s always something special about watching wild birds go about their daily lives, especially when they seem completely at ease, and it’s a privilege to capture a few of those fleeting moments through the lens.
These are just some of the visitors that brightened the garden over the weekend.
What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?
I’ve realised recently that it’s far easier to give up on someone than it is to find a way back to them.
Walking away is easy.
Rebuilding a bridge? That’s the difficult bit.
A little while ago I had a serious falling out with a family member. They’d been rude, self-obsessed and, to make matters worse, £75 disappeared from my bank account. It would have been a lot more had the bank not stepped in. Whether they took it themselves or knowingly allowed someone else to, the trust I’d placed in them vanished overnight.
I confronted them.
They reacted.
I reacted.
Two adults behaving like stubborn children, storming off in opposite directions, both convinced we were in the right.
Now, before anyone starts polishing my halo, let me be perfectly clear.
I’m no saint.
I shouldn’t have flown off the handle. I was angry, hurt and betrayed, and those emotions rarely produce our best work. Looking back, I probably should have left it alone for a couple of weeks, let the smoke clear and the dust settle, then reached out with a simple question.
“Fancy getting the tools out and rebuilding this bridge?”
Maybe the answer would still have been no.
Maybe nothing would have changed.
But at least I’d have known I’d tried.
Life has a habit of reminding us that tomorrow isn’t guaranteed. I’ve promised people I’d see them again, only for life to have other plans. Those are the moments that stay with you, and I’d hate to repeat that mistake because pride got the final say.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Some relationships are genuinely toxic, and walking away is absolutely the right thing to do. This isn’t about putting up with abuse or pretending betrayal doesn’t hurt.
It’s about recognising that not every argument deserves a permanent ending.
Sometimes people make terrible decisions.
Sometimes we say things we wish we hadn’t.
Sometimes we’re both waiting for the other person to make the first move.
The lesson I’ve learned is that forgiveness and reconciliation aren’t signs of weakness. They’re often far harder than anger.
So if you’re in the middle of a row with someone you genuinely care about, perhaps let the dust settle before deciding the bridge needs demolishing.
Because when the emotions have cooled, it’s worth asking yourself one simple question.
In the cold light of day, is this really worth losing someone over?
A good night’s sleep is incredibly important, and I’m sure you’re already aware of many of the benefits. Quality sleep helps bolster your immune system, protects your cardiovascular health, balances the hormones that regulate hunger, and makes it easier to maintain a healthy weight. Mentally, it’s just as important. Sleep consolidates memories, clears waste products from the brain, and improves emotional resilience, helping to reduce stress and anxiety.
So, how do I improve my sleep?
Like many autistic people, I love a good routine, and in this case, I think it has definitely worked in my favour.
About ten or fifteen minutes before I want to go to sleep, I stop whatever I’m watching or doing and put on some calming meditation music. I actually have one particular track on YouTube that I’ve been using for years. Those few minutes allow me to unwind and mentally let go of the day’s frustrations, confrontations and negative thoughts before I even get into bed.
Once I’m feeling more relaxed, I’ll climb into bed and read a few pages from my latest QI Book of Facts. Reading something enjoyable—but not too stimulating—helps signal to my brain that it’s time to switch off.
When it’s finally time to sleep, I ask my smart speaker to play white noise. Personally, I find the sound of heavy rain works best for me. It helps block out background noise and creates a familiar environment that my brain now associates with sleep.
I’ve followed this routine for many years. Is it perfect? No.
I still occasionally wake up screaming or experience night terrors, but I can honestly say that sticking to this routine has reduced both the frequency and severity of those episodes by around 85%. That’s been life-changing for me.
Will this exact routine work for everyone? Probably not. But it’s certainly worth experimenting until you find something that suits you. Sleep isn’t one-size-fits-all, and sometimes the smallest changes make the biggest difference.
The other thing I’ve found incredibly beneficial—and the science backs this up—is keeping a regular sleep schedule.
Going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time every day helps regulate your body’s natural circadian rhythm. Research has shown that consistent sleep patterns can significantly reduce the risk of depression compared with irregular sleeping habits. In fact, maintaining a regular routine is often just as important as getting the recommended seven to nine hours of sleep each night.
For me, good sleep doesn’t happen by accident. It’s something I prepare for.
A simple routine, a calm mind, a good book, the sound of rain, and a consistent bedtime have all helped me sleep better than I ever used to. If you’re struggling with sleep, don’t be afraid to try different approaches until you find your own routine.
Sometimes, the best night’s sleep starts long before your head hits the pillow.
The Ramblings of Bob Christian 