Page 16 - COBH EDITION 2nd NOVEMBER DIGITAL VERSION

‘This train journey brought me back in time’ - Trevor Laffan
Things happen from time to time to remind us that times
are changing. Like when friends of mine told me recently
that they were going to Dublin to see Cliff Richard and their
daughter, who is in her twenties, asked them who he was.
I thought that was hilarious and I was telling my son about
it, he’s also in his twenties, and he looked at me in a way
that made it obvious that he didn’t get the joke. He asked me
if Cliff Richard was a black lad with a lot of hair but then he
realised that he was confusing him with Lionel Richie.
I thought everyone on the Planet knew who Cliff Richard was,
but it turns out that you must be of a certain vintage to be in
the know.
Then there was the story about the telephone directory. An Post announced that they are
going to discontinue the annual distribution of telephone books to every household in the
country. That makes perfect sense given that many homes don’t even have a landline now
and most of us rely solely on the mobile phone.
There was a time though, not so long ago either, when directories were essential. When I
worked in An Garda Siochana, there were always a few of them knocking around the station
and sometimes you would struggle to get your hands on one. They were constantly in use.

They weren’t always in one piece either and there was nothing worse than trying to find a
number only to discover that the page you were looking for had been torn out. It baffled me
that some people found it easier to rip out the page than write down the number.

Some young people have never even seen a phone book and there are others who wouldn’t
know how to find a telephone number in one so now they are being consigned to history
along with Cliff.
The mobile phone has completely changed how we communicate with each other but there
are some daft aspects of this technology as well. I heard a lady called Jess Kelly on Newstalk
recently and she gave five mobile phones a test run over a period of time and then rated the
performance of each one.
According to Jess, the most important concerns when buying a mobile phone these days are
the battery life and camera quality. The cheapest phone she reviewed was about €800 and
the dearest was around €1,300. My bog-standard Samsung cost me around €80 and the bat-
tery life is fine. It also takes a good photo, allows me to use the Internet and it lets me make
a call and I can’t find any justification for spending any more than that.

Another thing that has changed a lot over the years is our rail service. At least, I thought it
had. Back in the early eighties, when I was stationed in Blackrock Garda Station in Dublin, I
used the train on a regular basis to get up and down to Cork. Getting a ticket wasn’t com-
plicated. You simply went to the ticket office in the railway station, bought your ticket and
hopped on.

If you were lucky you got a seat but if you travelled on a Friday afternoon you’d be lucky to
find space to sit on the floor. In those days, the carriages were rough and ready, and it wasn’t
unusual to travel without heat or light or both and a dining car was a rare treat.

I hadn’t been on a train for a long time, but I was told that Iarnrod Eireann had gone all posh
and sophisticated with new carriages that you can plug your laptop into and everything. I had