Side-Tracked by the World Wide Web

It’s strange how the Internet is becoming such an essential part of daily life:

Last evening for instance I wanted to know how to cook veal saltimbocca and couldn’t find a suitable cookbook. A few moments later (thanks to Google) I printed off an Elizabeth David recipe from www.ochef.com. It was all I could possibly want.

The boys in the office were challenging each other this morning about the meaning of the word wiggers. A quick look at www.urbandictionary.com not only educates me but makes me feel very old. There are so many words and expressions that I don’t know the meaning of (and to think that I considered myself pretty cool to have spotted chav and bling coming into regular use).

Newspaper reports about how wonderfully our young are doing with record numbers of GCSE passes had me musing about the whole issue of literacy and numeracy. Because I have been using English naturally for the best part of sixty years I have stopped thinking about the construction of sentences (gerunds, subjunctives, conjunctions and prepositions, and all that). In fact I have completely lost touch with some very simple basics of English grammar. I had to visit www.primaryresources.co.uk in order to reacquaint myself with adverbs and what they do and how to use them. Through the same site I got diverted by homophones, which was a bit worrying.

Hardly a day goes by without my consulting the fantastically good www.bbc.co.uk site. Weather, lottery numbers and, especially, the sports pages are all checked regularly, and the little box gizmo which shows the England-Australia test match score live at the foot of the screen is an essential item at this worrying time.

Meanwhile my family peddles its wares through www.ebay.co.uk, I run part of my business with two-way-traffic on www.amazon.co.uk and every morning I tend to check my emails before looking for the Royal Mail version. I find my way around with www.streetmap.co.uk, but so far I have refrained from playing online Sudoku and online Poker. How long I’ll hold out before I succumb to these last two is anyone’s guess.