A couple of weeks ago I blogged about how rubbish modern life was. Since then I have been inundated with people berating me for my curmudgeonly spirit. Well, there’s been a steady trickle anyway. ‘Oh come off it, Number6!’ they say. ‘You LOVE modern life. And anyway isn’t it a bit rich for someone who spends all her waking hours blogging, twittering, Googling, Facebooking and generally fiddling around with your phone all day long.’

Good point. So I had a long think about all the very many GOOD things about living in 2011. And here they are, in all their glory:

1. Sat nav. You still get lost, but at least you know where you are. Vaguely. And whether it’s dark outside.

2. Being able to Google stuff in the pub in order to prove someone wrong, or to look marginally less stupid in front of your friends.

3. CBBC and in particular Horrible Histories, Sorry I Lost My Head and the utterly GENIUS Copycats, the only television programme that has made me late for work. Almost.

4. Considerably less chance of dying of the Black Death than, say, 500 years ago.

Yes, that was as far as I got. On the way, though, I did think of some more terrible things about modern life, for example:

1. Sat nav. A conspiracy by the anti-car movement to send you the wrong way down one-way streets, into the kind of dead ends where you could EASILY dump a dead body and – on one memorable occasion – across a very deep ford.

2. Other people Googling stuff in the pub when you are trying to have a conversation. And it taking ages, because the signal is so bad, and so in the end they go outside and you’re left looking a little bit like you are so boring that your friends have to go outside and leave you in the pub on your own to avoid talking to you.

3. Terrible TV (i.e. everything not on CBBC). The kind of TV that relies on fake deadlines, manufactured tension and portentous music to create the superficial impression that it is mildly interesting and in no way a total waste of time. Sample dialogue: ‘Tension is BUILDING as the bakers are UNDER PRESSURE. THEY have only TEN MINUTES left to ice their cupcakes before the END of the THING that is going to RING! Will they make it???? Will the FLOUR FLY? Does anyone even CARE????’

4. Passwords – remembering or, more accurately, forgetting them. I consider myself to be a pretty intelligent person. I would say my absolute maximum brain capacity for remembering passwords was reached in about 1996. After that, every time I learn a new one, one of the old ones drops out of my ear and onto the floor. The worst ones are those that include a number in the mix. My record for remembering one of those is just under twenty three minutes.

5. Having to prove I’m a human by typing exactly what’s in the box, forcing me to squint at the screen in an unattractive way that makes me think I might look a bit like my mother without her reading glasses. Especially as I normally give an exasperated sigh at the same time. The other day I had to do a bit of mental arithmetic instead to prove I was a human being, which really made me sweat. ‘What is six times eight! Come on, come on, I’ll have to hurry you!’ What next? Prove you’re a human by typing in the box what you were doing when you heard Princess Diana had died?

6. Trying to book a ticket for the cinema through one of those automated systems – “two child tickets to see Cars 2 in Reading” – “I THOUGHT you SAID FOUR senior TICKETS to see SAW 3 in INVERNESS.”

So, there you go. Modern Life, it’s still rubbish. Feel free to add to my lists, if you can think of anything.
Best of luck with that.