You can send a text message and get an almost instant reply. You can send an email loaded with documents and similarly get a lightning-fast response. To which you’re all thinking, yes Jim, we know this. Don’t you have something fresh to say? To which the answer is no I don’t really, as this is more of a mini history lesson.

Although communication is now powered by grease lightning, whatever the hell that is, it wasn’t quite so slow in the past as today’s younger generation may think.

In the mid part of the last century there were five collections and deliveries of mail every day. If you sent a letter in the morning, you could receive a reply by the afternoon. People conducted love affairs by post.

Once Alexander Graham Bell had figured out the telephone you could chat. Initially people might have been ear wigging your most intimate conversations thanks to the unsecure nature of the party line. This is where you had to share a telephone number and wait your turn. Of course, as soon as people realised you could listen to what your neighbour was saying the fun began. The phone hacking of the 1990s was nothing new, but you did run the risk of hearing something wildly uncomplimentary about yourself.

And what about telegrams? I’m old enough to remember my parents taking me to weddings where aside from making a bright and witty speech insulting the groom the best man’s other duty was to assemble and read the telegrams sending congratulations from friends and family who couldn’t attend. These early forms of text messages were sent by wire and then sent on their way by motorbike. And they were expensive. During the early part of the 20^th century telegrams cost 6 pence for 12 words; any extra words cost a halfpenny each. A letter posted at the same time would cost a penny. Grams were therefore six times as expensive so unless you were wealthy, they were rarely used.

During World War 1 they acquired much darker associations. Official telegrams were the way families learnt somebody had been wounded, was missing or had been killed. Telegram messengers were said to deliver messages from heaven and hell. An unexpected telegram messenger appearing at your door during wartime could be terrifying.

But of course, anything that involves human communication soon finds people wanting to be funny. American humourist Dorthy Parker sent a telegram to a friend who had just had a baby saying: I knew you had it in you.

Robert Benchley, a writer on the New Yorker telegrammed his editor on arriving in Venice saying: Streets full of water. Please advise.

The playwright George Berhard Shaw is supposed to have telegrammed Winston Churchill with the message: I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play. Bring a friend — if you have one.

To which Churchill shot back: Cannot possibly attend first night. Will attend second — if there is one.

Trouble with that story is it may never have happened as there is no proof but why let facts get in the way of a good story? It’s too good not to be true.

In conclusion we weren’t so slow out of the blocks in days gone by and we weren’t constantly staring at our phones.

You may be wondering why there is a picture of a spotty Trabant at the top of this article. They never moved very fast, but I like the picture and I didn’t have anything suitable for this post.