Teaching an old dog new tricks....

I've been thinking a lot lately about the internet and all of the amazing possibilities it presents. For example, I'm now the proud owner of 122 friends on Facebook. These are (with the odd exception) all dear, dear friends from school, Austria, Chorley and now Wales, people with whom I have shared my childhood, my mission and the early years of my adulthood. We can share embarrassing school photos, watch each others kids grow and play Scrabble live over the internet - it's fantastic! Of course, working from home, it does take a superhuman amount of self-discipline to get some work done from time to time!

And talking of catching up friends old and forgotten (kind of), there's YouTube, which - like Facebook, totally rules the world. YouTube is a gigantic repository of video clips, most of which - I hasten to add - are the dregs left over when all of the quality is removed from a barrel, but amongst all of the chaff, there is some really good stuff. Being a huge fan of the UFC and not having Sky TV, I can view clips of all of the best bouts, and catch up with how everyone is doing. I can watch old episodes of Blackadder, the Two Ronnies and QI. We have watched all of series 3 of The Office and have nearly wet ourselves doing so. We have also used it a number of times as part of the girls' home education, finding nature clips and other gems.

We buy books at discount prices from Abe Books, having saved a fortune already this year. In fact at the start of the year, we bought a whole year's home ed curriculum from Sonlight. We swap DVD's with people from all over the UK and Europe using Eswapnow, and find all the latest bargains by logging into our account at Moneysavingexpert.com. Having saved all that money, we then bank online and pay bills and generally transfer money around (between the UK and the Caribbean, of course :D ).

It's hard to find an area of our lives that hasn't been greatly blessed and enhanced by the internet. We made a conscious choice a number of years ago to reduce the amount of rubbish that we were watching on TV, so that we could spend our time doing more useful things. So we got rid of the TV license, and just used the TV for watching videos and DVDs. Several years later, we have now got rid of the TV, video and DVD players, and have moved the computer into the family living room. We've always made an effort not to have the TV being the central point of people's attention as they walk into our room. Now we don't even have one for them to look at! Of course, we can still watch DVDs, but we are now more selective about what we watch and when. Since we made this quite bold move, we've noticed a big difference in the girls - they certainly weren't regular viewers before, but they hardly ever ask to watch films now. Instead, they ask to play internet games or to spend time working towards the next level in something like Study Dog, one of their English programmes.

I was trying to remember a time when we didn't have the internet. I had never even heard of it as a 20 year old missionary. I don't think we owned a computer until we moved to Chorley and I needed one for University, but even then, it was used as a word processor and nothing more. It wasn't really until we signed up for broadband in Wales that we started to realise the potential the internet had to change our lives. We started to watch some of the other sessions of Conference, research materials for lessons; in my work, I used it to carry out enormous research projects for client business plans I was writing. And so the transformation began, and we started to embrace it all whole-heartedly.

We often discussed the idea of selling up and travelling around Europe in a big camper van, and as much as that idea still appeals to us, it would mean having to learn how to live all over again, as we would have to do things without the net. Whether that is exciting or sad, I'll leave for you to decide, but either way, it shows what enormous changes life has seen since my parents were growing up. It fills me with a mixture of excitement and fear to try think how our children will be living when they are ancient like us!