Thrillsville, Arizona

When I was a teenager in the 1970's, life was so different from how it is now it is often hard for me to remember how much simpler, slower and yet in many ways more difficult things were.

Everything we take for granted these days - Internet, mobile phones, instant communication, instant answers, fast(er) decisions, (slightly) more spontaneity because many people can be more flexible - was unimaginable back then.

If you were out and missed your favorite program on TV, well - it was gone forever. You had no chance of taping it in advance - while video players might have existed in the USA, they weren't really on the popular market in England until the early 1980's.

It is incredible to imagine that I sometimes now call up the programs I missed seeing back then on YouTube now - nearly 40 years later, in some cases.

Nowadays if I miss something on TV, I can usually call at least a clip of it up on YouTube within a few hours. And I can watch programs I like on my PC or on DVDs again and again. Back then, you would never have dreamed of watching anything twice. Once it had been aired, it was old hat.

Instant chatting, texting, skyping - being able (in theory) to call anyone, anywhere at any time - never mind the 1970's, this was unthinkable even in the mid-1990's.

And where has it brought us? While some people might not be in favor of the concepts of instant availability and instant gratification, I think it has brought us a much better quality of life. Why hang around waiting when you can get so much done. Why waste time when you can be using it. Why live in ignorance when you can google any subject that you have always wanted to know the answer to and find it almost instantly?

In order to adapt to the changed world, even language has changed so much. Apart from the wealth of interesting terms you can find on the Urban Dictionary, for example, just about everyone's vocabulary includes "new" words and phrases that would not only have been incomprehensible in the 1970's, but also impossible to explain.

We used to have interesting expressions back then, too - but they have sadly fallen into disuse. "Now we're talking turkey" which today translates into, for example, "That's what I'm talking about"; "It pays the bills" has become "It pays the taxes"; "I'm going to go down the shops" could easily mean today "I need some retail therapy" and "For Pete's sake" has become something else altogether.

Not forgetting, of course the ever wonderful "Thrillsville, Arizona".