For someone who was (just about) born in the forties I feel I’m fairly conversant with modern appliances, The fact that the DVD player is beyond me is not commendable but I am now good with a mobile phone and sufficiently competent with the computer to write and post this.
I do have my moments though when I pine after the simplicity of earlier days.
I remember when I was touring Germany in 1967 meeting this man, who was an uncle of Jörge, my German friend.
This uncle talked about his neighbour who had bought a car in which the drivers seat “for his ease and comfort” could adopt fifty seven different positions.
His ease went immediately out the window.
He was never again happy with the position of the seat, always assuming that there was a more comfortable position than the one he was currently using.
(Jörge’s uncle also told us that , as a soldier in the ranks, he had been unhappy with his sergeant during WW2. “But all was fine in the end” he told us happily ” I waited until we were under enemy fire and then I shot him in the chest as he came towards me, they always thought he had been killed by the English”)

But to get back to my original point, about six months ago we bought ourselves an 05 Renault Megane which as well as a complicated heating system also has air conditioning. This multiplies by a large figure the permutations and complications of the heating and now cooling system.
We both spend far too much time fiddling with the switches on the dashboard trying to achieve the perfect temperature.
This is what brought on my Luddite moment.
In 1976 we bought our first car, it was at that stage about ten years older than that.
This was a Mini Van and it cost us £90(about €120)
Its heating system, which supplied perfectly all of our needs for warmth, window defrosting and hot air, was controlled from the dashboard by one single switch with two positions:
On and Off.

A Sixties Mini Van, same colour but way better nick than ours was.