I often fear that people believe the Sussex coastal town where I live, Seaford, to be a gerontocracy. Perhaps they're right. They've closed the town's youth centre and sixth form and now, in today's local paper, a town councillor sounds off against a planning application for a 3G mobile-phone mast, not on aesthetic grounds, nor on the spurious risk to health grounds that the feeble-minded usually invoke, but because no one in Seaford will want to use 3G because we're all too old.
Councillor Roy Bennett is quoted thus in the Sussex Express: 'How many people have these phones? They're expensive and I think the majority of people in Seaford just have mobile phones for convenience and emergencies. We are going to get more and more masts put up but I don't think the demand is there. Seaford has quite an elderly population and it will be years before it has a population which uses this sort of technology.'
Next time I come home on the train of an evening, I expect the train to be boarded at Bishopstone by a mob of vigilantes with councillor Bennet at its head, confiscating iPhones, iPods, laptops, and other evidence of the 21st century.
