I remember my parents had a set of encyclopaedias proudly displayed on a bookcase when I was a kid.  They were leather bound and very heavy, and presumably a big investment.  Apart from some minor historical value, I imagine they’d be worthless by now; how quickly we have become accustomed to having information at our fingertips.  Then last week my iPhone had to be fixed and I broke out in a bit of a cold sweat for the hour and a half it took to bring it back to life with the back up – the thought of not being able to read old text messages or see my call history, almost too much to bear. Modern problems.

The funny thing is that all this information seems to cause (me, anyway) as many problems as it solves.  The other day I was thinking about whether we should buy round-the-world flight tickets for our trip or go for individual flights.  As usual, I started with Google.  The results came in their thousands and with not enough days left in my life to read the results, let alone act on them, I headed over to a travel website and asked a few questions.  A very kind fellow traveller sent me a report that looks into this exact question. It’s over 30 pages long. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful for the report and all the effort that has gone into it, and I hope I can find the time to sit down and read it properly before the cost of flights starts to rise.  Another job for the list.

And just when I thought that this is the price of the information age, Nick told me that there are programs you can use to filter Google results and make internet searches more relevant, with less of the junk that usually overwhelms me.  The trouble is I can’t remember where he said to find them.

Maybe I’ll Google it…