Is It Just Me? by Miranda Hart

this – you type a letter on that, and it comes up on the paper. Except instead of coming up on the paper, it comes up on a computer screen. And then you can send it to another person’s screen. Anywhere in the world.
    How does THAT work? Does it go on the invisible electric highway in the sky, too?
    I DON’T KNOW HOW IT WORKS. I DON’T KNOW HOW ANYTHING WORKS! IT JUST DOES. IT JUST HAPPENS!
    Now,
YOU
CALM DOWN! What about pens and paper? Do people still use them?
    A bit. But we don’t really send letters any more.
    Oh, but I LOVE getting letters. I love rushing to the door when the postman’s just been in the hope I’ll have a letter addressed to me to open. Then rush away to see what new writing paper the girls might have used to tell me their holiday gossip. I would really miss that. Not to mention the exotic French handwriting from pen pal Pierre in Perpignan.
    But emails mean that you can do work absolutely anywhere. You can be on a train, and it can be exactly like you’re in the office. It’s great.
    Seriously, HOW is that great? You are really bugging me now. Trains are NOT for working on. One of our very favourite things is looking at the lovely views, watching the world go by, having a pack lunch and getting excited about wherever it is you’re going.
    I admit I had forgotten that.
    Why don’t you try life without your mobile phone? Turn it off. Put it away.

    WHAT? But I get into a panic in that brief moment I’m rummaging in the depths of my bag thinking I’ve lost my phone until I remember it’s in the special safe pouch at the front of it.
    Oh, grow up! It’d just be for a week.
    A WEEK! No, thanks. I’d feel abandoned. Alone. Isolated. Terrified. Weak. Constantly thinking that I might be missing something.
    Where do you live? Central Sahara? Oh gosh, we don’t live in a remote desert do we?
    No, in London.
    Do we? Without Mum and Dad? That’s well cool, but hardly a place to be isolated, you – I will say it again – IDIOT. I think you’ll find that if someone really needs and wants to get in touch with you they will leave an answer phone message telling you to call them back like we do in 1991 – THANK YOU VERY MUCH! And there’s always a pay phone.
    A pay phone?
    Don’t they still exist?
    Do you know – I have no idea. OK, well, how about this invention . . . You are quite a big fan of ‘optional silliness’, aren’t you, Little M?
    I most certainly am. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that ‘optional silliness’ is what makes life worth living.
    Then might I introduce you to the most wonderful thing about modern life? We call it . . . The Internet. And before you say ‘WHAT?’ again, the internet is the whole world on your computer. I can just go to my computer, type in whatever I want to find out about (which we call ‘googling’) and immediately I receive a vast mass of information.
    That sounds very good, actually. I approve.
    At last. Also, if you’ve got the internet, you can watch little video clips of funny things – like
You’ve Been Framed
, but on your computer, whenever you like. Yesterday I watched a penguin sneezing, a cat eating a cheeseburger, and some ducklings being blown over in the wind. (For seven hours, MDRC, but let’s not tell Little Miranda.)
    OK. That is a bit brilliant.
    And then you get this thing called Facebook, where basically all your friends have pages, and you have a page, and the pages say who you are, what you do . . .
    But your friends know who you are and what you do.
    No, wait, you can message each other little notes –
    But you’ve got your mobile phones for that.
    Yes, but these can be longer messages, if you want.
    Isn’t that what emails are for?
    Well, the messages are about different things to the sort of things you’d text or email. It might be about something you’ve just seen, a comment about what’s going on in the world, what you are up to . . .
    Can’t you just tell your friends when you next see