Living in a computer-driven world!

"Bitcoin is a cybercurrency and a digital payment system." So began an explanation of "Bitcoin". That was enough to swirl me into the world of science fiction. I was looking it up because I had read about Ransomeware being used in the latest cyberattack, this time on the NHS and other organisations throughout Europe. Ransomeware apparently demands payment in Bitcoin to release the computer systems it has frozen. From what I read, this latest attack is not the first. Many hospitals have already been targeted. This is just one of the biggest.

What with this and electoral systems being hacked into, the world seems very strange. This is the kind of thing that used to happen is science fiction stories twenty years or more back. So maybe the politicians are not wrong to want to send us back to a less IT-driven age. Although none of them seem to agree about what constitutes nostalgia politics. Is it nationalised railways? Is it selective schooling? Is it unions with power? Or politicians capable of robbing them of their power? Whatever it is, I don't think we are going to go back to the seventies!

As regards selective schooling and testing and the like, here is a link to one teacher's thoughts on the kind of tutoring that seems to be necessary these days to get school pupils through SATS, the 11+, GCSE and AS and A Level exams. Someone should listen to teachers. Maybe then they would not have to keep on fighting the same battles we fought forty-odd years ago.

Elsewhere in the paper today, Tim Dowling wrote about his experience as a father. Not another nostalgia trip this. I enjoy reading Tim Dowling's regular column; I like the way he always talks about the "band I am in" and never "my band". He makes no stake for ownership or for being the boss. His son was very generous about bis father's column, which unashamedly uses events in the family's real life. "It's amazing", he wrote, "to have a record of our family life that goes back so many years. Everything is there, from learning to ride a bike to leaving home. The column was a great way to keep up with events at home from university while simultaneously avoiding my parents."

Tim Dowling writes of his astonishment that two decades of parenting have passed him by - his oldest is 22 and his youngest is about to be 18 - while he still feels that he is just learning the trade. I know what he means; I feel much the same about housekeeping. Every time I do a major clean-up I think to myself that this is the kind of thing that "proper housewives" do all the time, on a much more regular basis. Somehow I have never felt like a "proper housewife". We completed our final year at university as married students; I was a student playing at being a housewife, with some feminist-demanded help from my husband. Then we got jobs as teachers and again we played housekeeping in between marking and preparing lessons and going to union meetings and organising extra-curricular activities. And when the children came along, well, it was more of the same. There were always more interesting things to be done than concentrating on being a "proper housewife".

So I can fully understand Tim Dowling's sentiments.

I particularly appreciated his comments about the IT-related stuff. His first son was born pre-google and his two other sons post-google. So effectively his son's have always had the internet around. Consequently he had felt no compunction about directing them to the computer to find answers to some of the difficult questions. The question of sex, however, came up for the first time when son number one was only five or six. After some shilly-shallying on Daddy's part, Mummy stepped in, he wrote, and gave the child a "brief but frank description of the whole business". The child's reaction was classic; he turned to look at his father and said, "You certainly wouldn't want anyone to walk in and see you doing that."

Some things have to be explained without the use of IT!