28th March 2011

Popped into Brampton this morning.

Brampton in Cumbria is our nearest Market Town, the surgery is there, it has a cottage hospital, a charity bookshop, a number of charity shops and antique shops, a couple of good Butchers and a fantastic co-op. It is very close to Hadrian's Wall and as such is both a tourist destination as well as the largest town between Carlisle and Haltwhistle on the A69.

Brampton is a transition town. Fair Trade is a feature of life here. There is a community cafe in the community centre, a film club, a wholefood shop and occasionally Alan Bennett can be seen in the town.

Remnants of the Ninth Legion are reportedly still fighting the Picts just north of the Town and the new film Eagle of the Ninth should put hadrian's wall and Brampton firmly on the map.


The Moot Hall built in 1817 hosts both the Tourist Information Centre and a number of community Coffee mornings.

There is a Wednesday Market and a regular farmers market.

Today we quite fancied a coffee so we popped into Off the Wall, because Brampton is literally just off Hadrian's Wall (clever stuff this!).

The cafe has a face book page, see: http://www.facebook.com/pages/Off-The-Wall/105424000970 and last Friday our friends Stew and Danny aka Hadrian's Union played at the cafe, see: http://hadriansunion.com/ or look them up on facebook, http://www.facebook.com/#!/home.php?sk=group_199455846740191

It was a particularly nice cup of coffee because we shared the table with our daughter and our youngest and newest grandchild Evie. But £1.50 for a double espresso is not bad and I am told the cake was nice too (it is Lent after all).

But what was amazing and what this is leading to, is that the cafe was almost full, it was buzzing, and nearly all the customers (apart from our youngest daughter and our youngest and newest granddaughter Evie) were senior citizens and they were all feverishly tapping away on lap top computers.

It was clearly the morning of the silver surfers.

There they were drinking coffee and surfing away, facebooking, tweeting, buying stuff on the net, downloading all sorts of stuff ( I didn't ask)I don't know whether it was an organised course or whether folk were completing their census forms online or if it was a drop in or a session organised by the open university or just the council spending some unspent grant or council tax money before the end of the financial year, but it was great.

I did check to see if there was a spare lap top (there wasn't and it was also clear that people were pleased to see Evie because I am sure that even at three weeks old she could have given them a bit of advice as to how to send their e mails or how to set up a face book page, children are born with this knowledge these days.

The reason older folk find technology so scary is that they haven't learned the lesson of Matthew 18:1-6, 'Except you become as little children, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven' or in this case the kingdom of Bill Gates and Microsoft or if you're that way inclined, Steve Jobs and Apple.

The thing is children are fearless, they press and point and play and make mistakes and learn from them and press and point and play again until they get it right. And as a new book called The Rational Optimist is suggesting there is increasingly, a shared memory, a kind of social capital building, into which we all contribute and to which we all have access, in summary we are all standing on the shoulders of giants, which depending on your preference is a quote from Oasis or Sir Isaac Newton.

Social knowledge is the key not individual learning.

I think that silver surfers are great because, like me, they grew up in a time when only posh houses had telephones and a letter was the only way to communicate. Libraries were where you went to gain knowledge from the reference books that couldn't be taken out.

Imagine, a world without Wikipedia and Google! Now 'google' is a verb meaning: 'to find out or discover'.

The rate of change over the lifetime of older people today has been phenomenal and it is brilliant that they are not only moving with the times but moving ahead of them even Skyping grandchildren to natter or help with homework.

So let's hear it for the silver surfers of Brampton, clearly Off the wall in more ways than one .....