Happy Friday everyone!
For those of you who are new to BISS, my Friday Thoughts emails began during lockdown as a way of keeping in contact with colleagues around the world and sharing my musings from that week. Some were more ‘deep and meaningful’, others less so… They were, however, most definitely not a compulsory read.
This week I am writing while listening to the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack on Spotify (please don’t judge). I have to admit to having a rather eclectic taste in music and I have to admit that I like it because it is rather cheerful and upbeat as well as bringing back fond memories. I am certainly not a comic superhero film fan and found myself watching the film rather by accident. The appearance of a Sony Walkman along with a mixtape definitely caught my attention… Yes, I do fear I am showing my age but I have such fond memories of listening to the radio poised ready to record a song to add to the latest mixtape and then sharing it with friends. Even at university I remember the sheer joy of receiving a tape in the post from someone who had compiled a mix of songs they knew I would like then listening to it in my room with a smile on my face. Yes, we still wrote letters to eachother; the college computer room was certainly not for frivolities such as surfing the web via the now-discontinued Internet Explorer or sending emails. Shock horror, some people didn’t even have email addresses! Those were the days of posting a postcard on the first day of your holiday so that it arrived before you got back and ringing home using a payphone with the stack of 10p pieces you had saved up, or, if you were really lucky, you had a phone card one and didn’t have to fiddle with all the change.
When I think about how we are now able to keep in touch with eachother with immediacy, pinging messages quite literally around the world with not even the click of a button but the tap of a screen. My mother bought my father a new laptop for his birthday this year. His last one was ten years old. I had to suppress a smile when he asked for another Samsung because he knew how it worked… Trying to set it up for him remotely with a dodgy WhatsApp video connection (the first few minutes were trying to persuade him not to have the phone to his ear...) was also a challenge but we got there. A few days later he messaged to say he had invested in ‘Windows 10 for Dummies’ to learn how to drive it. He doesn’t watch YouTube videos to learn things, he looks at books. I’m proud of my dad and I hope I am still that switched on when I’m 80!
It’s been an eventful week and really great to be welcoming so many people back to China ready for another exciting year. Somehow it is already the end of August 2020...
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