Nowt nor Somat

As I suspect I have green-inked about this more than once before. Yet I find myself  impelled to do so once again. Yesterday morning my mobile phone (cell) woke me at 7.45. So up I get, track down my handbag (purse) locate the frantic phone, slump back on the bed and answer it. It was the garage advising me my car needed its M.O.T (road-worthiness) test because the current one runs out in two days. I suggested it was a bit early to ring a retired person, offered to ring them back (when my brain was also awake) and would they please, in future, use my land line. This was a request repeated with every contact with them.

As before, they agreed. However, it set me thinking. Just about everyone from toddling to retirement has a mobile phone and this object is carried close to their person in pocket or bag. It means that one can be reached absolutely anywhere. No more hopelessly ringing your home phone in their office hours which exactly co-incide with your office hours. "We have tried without success to contact you a number of times...." which results in being thrown off their list, disinherited, a penalty charge, an appearance at the Magistrates' Court and so on and so forth. To everyone younger than I am it makes no sense at all to use any other means of communication. I can just about remember where the d.... thing is and hear it only when I have my hearing aids in, never mind seeing it as connecting me to the rest of the world.  I have learned to give only the landline number when asked, just as I have learned to say "Mrs. Mountford" when giving my  name if I don't want the teenager in accounts to call me "Elizabeth"  A shaft of light pierced the mist and mobile phones suddenly fell in to their proper seat in the current world. The problem for a 75 going on 40 is how to take advantage of technology without losing touch with things which still work in the old style. How would I be a Mumsnet Blogger without it? How would I acquire  an urgently needed book - for a discussion group, since you ask - without amazing Amazon. How would I fill my mineral water needs and my washing machine needs without the online supermarket?  But I am not prepared to expose my banking needs to technology, nor do I pay bills nor perform any other such delicate duties using it. There must be a way in which I can find a compromise so that I am neither Luddite nor Technolover. At the moment I am neither one thing nor the other, (hence "nowt nor somat"). I an straddling the C20th and the C21st and at serious risk of being torn apart astride those two. I beseech you: advise me how to resolve this dilemma before I am forced to do the proverbial splits. Not a good look on an old lady. Bore da