London - My dad, 74, has discovered FaceTime. This is very distracting for the rest of us.
His enthusiasm for his new gadget, which allows you to chat face-to-face with someone via your iPad screen, knows no bounds, despite his late arrival to the age of technology.
Honestly, one minute he thinks Google is a character from The Magic Roundabout and the next it appears he’s qualified to remotely land the Mars Rover.
Suddenly, the man I spoke to on a monthly basis has become a daily visitor.
Dad is so evangelical about his love of FaceTime, so knowledgeable, I half expect to see Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg on screen behind him, taking tips.
Our kids have labelled him “Grandad the techspert”.
The possibilities of his new adventure are “endless”, as he points out.
“I could have seen you give birth,” he says wistfully, regretting his delayed discovery of the app that allows you to have a free video phone call. I can literally see his mind boggling as we speak.
“I think it’s good you didn’t, actually, Dad,” I reply, “on account of all the swearing.”
“What are you doing at work tomorrow?” he asks. “I could come with you.” Lord help us.
I see no end to his FaceTime frenzy, despite its often inconvenient and comic interruption of our chaotic domestic schedule.
Thankfully, he has come a long way since the first comedy FaceTime call. He has stopped shouting, “Are you there?” loudly at the screen — a common trait among silver surfers, I notice.
And he no longer taps it fiercely when a poor connection interferes with one of his longer stories about the cataclysmic weather down south.
I fear he’s about to start researching long-lost relatives so he can FaceTime them from the comfort of my childhood bedroom, now rebuilt as mission control or “the main frame”, as my husband refers to it.
But, actually, I don’t mind that yesterday I had four missed FaceTime calls from Dad in an hour, or that he usually rings during busy bath, bed or tea times.
Because this new gadget of his has closed the 300-mile gap between my wonderful father and his four grandchildren.
He looks like the happiest man alive when he sees them on the screen. I want to reach through it and hug him.
His face lights up in a contagious grin as they shout, “Grandad, Grandad,” before embarking on a flurry of show-and-tell.
They take him off on all sorts of jaunts round the house — this morning after breakfast, he met Molly the new fish and then patiently watched Unwanted Walter, our dwarf hamster, hanging upside down from the bars of his cage “like a fluffy key ring”, as the toddler observed.
He even saw a few seconds of ten-year-old Gracie’s guitar assembly at school, via a pre-arranged secret FaceTime.
We have always been fans of screen time in our house (and not just the ever-so-useful electronic babysitter, or TV, as it is also known).
Gadgets are never banned here, and we’re not the kind of parents who would ever enforce a digital sabbatical for the children.
The dawn of this new age of ever more sophisticated ways to communicate can only be a good thing, in my mind.
The eldest two FaceTime their friends while they do their homework.
For a fleeting second, my first response was to ban it until they’d finished, but actually, it’s a useful study aid and makes them dread this duty less.
In a few years, my teenage girls will head off on a gap year — I’m hoping that, by then, I’ll be able to track them via GPS implants and talk to them face-to-face on their smart watches.
Technology is something to embrace, not fear.
My dad’s only murmur of criticism during his love fest with FaceTime is the quality of the picture.
“You’d think with all these developments, they could make me look younger,” he said. - Daily Mail
* LORRAINE CANDY is editor-in-chief of Elle