VERITY LUSH: What's next '“ full-on facial recognition?

Plugging the PC into the phone landline, waiting an age for it to dial up (yes, whippersnappers, you could actually hear it dialing), and then logging on. Which also took an age.

Once into one’s emails, there would generally be little of use, due to so few friends actually having access to email.

If you wanted to check it, you had to wait until you were home or near an ‘internet café’, because even texting was a novelty – let alone a mobile phone that could email, act as a camera, and give open access to the information super-highway that is the World Wide Web.

Internet shopping was new and usually involved seeing pictures of what you wanted and getting a phone number so you could ring the shop in question and pay over the phone.

People still ordered books from bookshops – no Kindles or Amazon back then – and most of us still had VHS video players as well as, if one were feeling especially new-fangled, a DVD player.

When writing about it (or speaking about it, as I was to a colleague recently), it is slightly bonkers to think that this was only 17 years ago. The pace at which our lives have evolved is mind-blowing.

Which leads me to wonder, what’s next?

The standard answer to anything futuristic, according to movie-makers, has always been flying cars.

I don’t recall any 80s movies that imagined the Internet and phones that enabled you to do everything that you couldn’t even do on a PC in those days.

So, in another 20 years, what is to come? And will it be a good thing?

I suspect flying cars are some way off (good), but are we going to be hit full-on with facial recognition left, right and centre, for example? Will security cameras be identifying who and where we are as we tootle about on our daily business?

Will even more of our lives be directed solely by screens? Or will we become so sick of it that we revert to slate and chalk?

OVERPOWERING STENCH OF CHILDREN’S SWEATY LUNCHBOXES

My children have reached the age where they are akin to a swarm of giant locusts, swooping noisily through the kitchen, demolishing food on sight.

Being a Great Big Meanie, I don’t buy much in the way of snackage for the Lush household.

Mainly because I would most likely then do my own giant locust-impersonation and scoff the lot, but also because if it’s not there, they can’t

munch it, and are forced into eating fruit.

I also put fruit in their lunchboxes. It is often still there when they get home. As I go to wash the sweaty boxes that have festered in hot classrooms all day, the stench of sour yoghurt attacks my nostrils, and I remove whatever poor, uneaten, by now shrivelled piece of forgotten fruit remains.

A SYMPHONY OF STRETCHING MUSCLE AND BONE

Having always been stuck somewhere in between confused and slightly sceptical as regards chiropractors, I am now very firmly in the devotee camp.

I had a running injury a few months back that knocked me out of various races that I had entered and, more annoyingly, took away my self-prescribed form of headspace from the manic existence that is life in the 21st century.

After some physio, I decided to try a chiro, mainly because my friend had recommended hers and I firmly trust her opinion.

Off I trotted and back I pranced – lighter, springier, and decidedly more mobile.

To the extent that when I now stretch my back, my backy bits (vertebrae etc I presume), all move with me.

I can hear them! Like a slightly creepy little xylophone.