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My friends berate me for only just having changed from using a purpose built sat-nav to a smartphone app.

My mother is much further behind the times but has methods of coping surprisingly well. About fifteen years ago she refused declined to have a computer and an email address, yet last month she sent a framed picture as a wedding gift to Seattle without shipping it across the Atlantic. The picture is of the local church in the middle of the area where my friends and I grew up. She saw it hanging in the local branch of her bank. She's never heard the phrase ".pdf file" but she accosted the bank manager and demanded that he send a "digital version" to my brother in Texas. He wasn't even very surprised to receive the email from the manager of a bank that he doesn't use in  a country where he doesn't live. He dutifully sent the .pdf file to Walgreens to be printed and framed and set the delivery address to the happy couple's house.

It all worked and they're very happy with it.

Richard "This is the modern world" B

During the Civil War

At the weekend I bought a new crash helmet. I would tell you all about how and why I bought it but I am extremely self-conscious that I might witter on too long.

When I still lived with my parents one of my friends came over for coffee and politely said to my mum "I see you've got a new crash helmet". "Yes." she said "During the civil war the Radfords were a very powerful family in Plymouth... banking systems... wealth as gold and jewellery... armies need to be paid... wars are expensive... royalist army… parliamentarians... fighting moved to the Southwest... buried the treasure... family were killed... lost for generations... founding of America... Industrial revolution... First world war... Second world war... baby boom... need for new houses... improvement in archeological techniques... metal detectors... discovered the Radford treasure... acquired by the British museum... London... people of Plymouth... loaned to Plymouth museum...”

After an hour we'd got about 350 years through a story of world history and a museum exhibit that my mum had gone to see. This could have been the starting point for her story about her helmet being stolen. We hadn't got a word in edgeways, our coffee cups were long since empty and cold, and we were sitting in polite shellshocked disbelief.

My friend will still sometimes say "During the civil war" as a code for "This story bores me".

Richard "Skip to the end." B

Bladder

A few weeks ago I was sailing in a Salcombe yawl with my brothers. We were on the water pretty much all day, we only came ashore to drink a few pints and buy pasties in the middle of the day. By the middle of the afternoon a practical matter of seamanship had become pressingly urgent. How do you pee off a Salcombe yawl? The curvature of the hull means that you can't stand anything like close enough to the side to aim over the gunwhales. The stern decks is too wide and there's a mizzen sail in the way. The boat isn't big enough or stable enough to stand on the side deck. My brother managed to half-stand-half-kneel with one foot inside the boat and one knee on the side deck, it just about worked but it was awkward and ungainly. I was told to go into the bailer and then tip it over the side. Initially this seemed luxurious – I could turn by back on the rest of my family and lean against the mast for support. I discovered soon afterwards that the bailer was about 10% smaller than the capacity of the human bladder. "Two bailer" is now a colloquial term for the highest level of urinary urgency.

Richard "stem the flow" B

Bleeding Brakes!

It was my birthday last week. With characteristic eccentricity my mother didn't just give me a keepsake to mark the occasion. She wanted me to have something that I would genuinely like and realised that she wouldn't know what to buy. Instead she gave me a cheque and the task of both cashing the cheque and buying my own present.

I work nearly full time and the nearest bank that is open on a Saturday is a 15 mile round trip from my house with difficult parking, I wasn't delighted about the "chore" component of my present.

This is what she eventually gave me.

It's, not a hookah pipe, it's not a bong, and it's not some sort of marital aid. It's a manual pressure bleeder for the brake system in a car. Ordinarily you need either a friend, an airline, or a spare tyre. With this system you half fill the vessel with brake fluid and pump it up to 10psi or so. It screws onto the master cylinder reservoir and then you have the whole system under pressure and the fluid being constantly topped up. You can bleed the brakes perfectly without assistance and changing all the fluid in the system becomes the work of minutes. It's just what I've always wanted – for the last few weeks since my friend lent me one.

Richard "billy-no-mates" B

Brakes!

A few weeks ago I was on a track day at Donnington Park on the GP circuit. Even in my little underpowered car we were approaching the Melbourne Hairpin at around 115mph and needed to scrub off about 90mph before the corner. You find yourself rather busy for two or three seconds: Press the brake firmly with the toes of the right foot; clutch down; gear lever into third; left hand back to the steering wheel; press and release the accelerator with the heel of the right foot; clutch up smoothly; clutch down; gear lever into second; left hand back to the steering wheel; press and release the accelerator; clutch up smoothly. And that's all before you've started thinking about turning the wheel.

During my frantic flailing at the controls I would often make a mistake with the gear lever and either grind the gears or end up in the wrong one. My passenger is a good friend who has devoted nearly 40 years to good natured piss taking. The car is a loud environment and the motion is quite violent, but he was still able to shout things like "Try Second" or "It's a standard H pattern" as I approached the hairpin.

On the same weekend I was lent a fantastic book called "How to Drive a Car" which was rescued during the clearance of my sister's late godmother's house. It was published in 1950 and it's so dated that it has become funny to read, it talks about cripples in invalid tricycles and nursemaids pushing perambulators with their human cargo.

Here are a couple of paragraphs:

"Who has not in the past seen many a suffering motorist going through barrel organ motions at the front of his car in often unsuccessful effort to wake it into life, and possibly in the process receiving a sprained thumb or wrist? Luckily those days are almost gone, for modern self-starting mechanism, electrically operated, is now incorporated that makes it possible for even the frailest feminine hand to start the most powerful engine by merely pressing this knob."

"Many years ago the authors used to advise would-be motorists to thoroughly master double de-clutching with no more complicated equipment than a piano, a flower pot and a walking stick!"

Richard "Learn to Drive" B