I must have been living on the moon for the past number of years, so changed has the modern business become . . . like all people with a lack of information, the world of shopping came crashing in on me when I went looking for the simplest item and found out that I was 30 years behind the times.

Someone had given me a present of the Brendan Balfe Production The Irish Voice, a three-parter which featured everything from the Titanic loss to the Flanagan Brothers, to Micheal MacLiammoir.

Can I digress for a moment to say what an extraordinary production this is, with real gems such as Patrick Kavanagh’s Spraying of the Potatoes, The Spinning Wheel by Delia Murphy, the brilliant Eamon Morrisey reciting Flann O’Brien’s The Workman’s Friend, and even Josef Locke singing Hear my Song Violetta.

But this piece is not about the joys of the three disc set, though I will return to it later. It’s about the extraordinary business of deciding that you might like to see or hear something and suddenly you find yourself in the middle of a new world of shopping which is based around a new world of computers and phones.

As I said, someone had given me a present of the three disc set, but I wanted something simple to play the tracks on. All sorts of options were put to me, including transferring tracks to a computer and then onto an iPod, but like all traditionalists, I wanted something simple with as few controls or buttons as possible. In other words; one to stop it, one to make it play, one to reverse it, one to make it go forward and one to eject the disc.

So, one of my resident computer experts suggested we check what was in the shops. I said that meant traipsing around the shops over the next few days and for my pains got an indulgent smile at how I could be so out of date. He pulled out his phone and began shopping, as I looked on like some kind of thicko from another generation.

My resident genius connected to a series of shops in Galway to find out if they had one of the cheap manually operated CD players with the five buttons . . . in other words eminently suitable for an electronic thicko who still listens to the radio and who would not know in a million years how to programme a television or a video to record anytime in the next fortnight.

My resident genius announced that there was a player available in Argos, which seemed eminently suited to my prehistoric mindset – the player had five buttons, the discs were manually inserted and extracted, the stereo sound I found more than adequate, even for John McCormack and, above all, it seemed ‘idiot proof, which is a very important feature when dealing with ‘cavemen’ who have survived into the electronic era.

But the thing which most caught my eye was the fact that you could dial into a shop’s system, find out if they had one in stock, get the price of the item and reserve the item for a few days if you wished to pick it up. Oh yes, you could also get a picture of the player.

With the whole of that information, I have to confess that I felt like a bit of a ‘ludramán’ . . . even an offer to explain how these things work was turned down . . . dammit, my life is complicated enough without having to learn how to use the full panoply of services which the modern phone brings.

For more, read this week's Galway City Tribune.