My grandmother is now rapidly reaching her 101st birthday.

Trying to think of the changes she has seen in her life quite boggles the mind. She has seen electric light for the first time, she has seen voices coming out of nowhere on a radio., she has seen mobile telephones become ubiquitous. She has seen two world wars, she has seen Man land on the moon. She has seen computers take over the world. She has seen the earliest cinemas, and seen televisions appear in people’s houses.

I wonder if I will ever see anything in my lifetime that is as revolutionary as these things in her life have been. If I get some form of TV that projects emotions, then that will be an evolution of TV. If I see some kind of mobile telepresence, will that be more than a development of mobile phones?

Maybe there will be truly revolutionary things… Teleportation springs to mind (although that may just be an evolution of the car).

I don’t know. In some ways it seems as if the supposedly frantic pace of development has reached a crawl. Yeah sure, LTE is on its way… so w’ll get slightly faster data, but who cares? Show me a use for it that will blow my mind; until then it’s just so much blah…

Back to the picture. Here Grandma Boyd sits with three other generations of her children, though not all from the same branches of the family.

Behind and to the (photograph) right of Grandma Boyd are Lilias and Alberto – Lilias is her daughter and my Aunt. To the camera right are Lilias’ son Juan Carlos and his wife Bea, and at camera left are Marie and me. Finally, standing in front and trying to block everyone else out are Jenni and Cameron.

It’s likely that I won’t post tomorrow evening (I’ll be taking pictures, never fear), so have a great New Year when it comes