Purple Grasshopper

Arriving in England in the dead of winter probably wasn’t the best time to move to a new country. But in the last 13 years I’ve actually discovered there isn’t really ever a good time to move here.

January was the first month I was here. So a short summary of the weather as I remember it…. rain, wind, gale force wind, more rain. Oh add some hail, and that wind I talked about? Add cold with cold wind as well. Not exactly the type of weather I’m used to, apart from the rain that is.

You can imagine my amazement when I hear what sounds like an ice cream truck driving past the house. In January! It just didn’t make a bit of sense. But from the third floor window I’d stand and watch it roll down the road, it’s happy music sounding as tinny and awful as it did when I was a kid. But this wasn’t a blazing hot day, it was January and it was cold. Still while I spent an amazing amount of hours looking out that window, as the ice cream truck rolled down the road it would finally come to a stop and kids would come out to get ice cream.

It made me think about ice cream and my own youth. At home we didn’t call it an ice cream truck, it was the ice cream man. And the man had a very odd scooter type thing that only sold ice cream sandwiches and different types of popsicles. The story my Mom would tell me about how a cousin rode his bike down the steps of the first house I lived in to catch the ice cream man. Or the many times my lip would get stuck on the popsicle, the only choice was to rip the two apart which always resulted in a bloody lip.

The best memory of the ice cream man was this. My best friend and I were attempting to sell lemonade. Which was pointless as always but we thought we’d make loads of money. Normally we ended up drinking a huge amount of it ourselves and then feel ill. But this one day it was different. The ice cream man came past. He stopped at our little stand and made us the best deal we could ever have expected.

Two glasses of lemonade and we got free popsicles. I can still remember how cool it was, how big I felt, how special I felt. I couldn’t wait to tell everyone I saw about how I’d got free ice cream.

I can still see that day perfectly when I really think about it and it still makes me smile.

The ice cream truck doesn’t show up on our road in the middle of winter any more. It still comes past, but only in the summer.  But now I associate it with that first bleak winter I spent here, a black and white world where this brightly coloured truck with it’s loud, tinny, happy music would roll into view.

The new buzz word seems to be ‘Social Media’.  It’s a phrase that seems to lump so many things into one box. What amazes me the most is the fact that this so called ‘Social Media’ seems to have just appeared in the last couple of years. Around the time that Facebook got to be big. It’s become trendy, the new in thing. All the Clebs are doing it, you aren’t cool if you aren’t on Twitter these days. What gets me is how it’s all being made out to be something new. When for me it’s been a way of life since I was in my 20s.

I missed the ‘start’ of social media on the Internet. I never participated in any newsgroups (although I lurked and read quite a  few to start with) and message boards. I did take advantage of the free AOL disks you used to get in the mail so I could chat on line. From there I graduated to the big kids play ground IRC.  I was shown how and then taught myself how to write small and basic scrips to run on the ‘channel’ I spent the most time on. I learned about shell bots, telneting, and all sorts of other things that at the time were so shiny and new. I taught myself  HTML and had my own website.  I moved on from IRC  and used instant messenger programs such as AIM, MSN, and ICQ. My husband and I used the forerunner of Skype, a program called Pow-Wow, to chat when we were first getting to know each other. Dial up was the only choice at the time so the lag was awful! In the end we gave up trying to talk to each other and just played CD’s using Pow-Wow and used the text box to chat in while the music played.

A conversation with a friend once led us up to the point where we both realized that had it not been for the Internet, we would have never met. It also led us to realize that in fact we knew all the people we did because of the Internet. Either directly or indirectly. It was amazing to think that we hadn’t randomly met anyone in a very long time.  It made me try to remember when the last time I’d met someone who wasn’t connected to the net in some way. And by that I mean I haven’t been at a gathering that hasn’t been set up over the net for like minded people to attend. Even my husband, where I live now and knowing all his friends, are all a direct result of the Internet.

So ‘Social Media’ isn’t new to me it’s just got a new place in the modern world it seems. And with that it looks like I’ve finally become main stream. And that’s a scary thought all by it’s self.