"Space, the Final Frontier..."

I like using text on the mobile phone - cheap, easy and quick. I got up this morning to a text from my very good friend Barry Chessman, an Emotional Freedom Technique practitioner and technician during the day. The text was sent at 2 am because he was on call on his job and the message was full of technical jargon and I did wonder why Barry was sending me some fairly obscure stuff which didn't make a great deal of sense. Of course he had selected the wrong person from his contacts and we've both had a good laugh about it.

But it's easy to do - I have big fingers and texting can be difficult and mistakes a regular occurrence. I recall my first use of a 'mobile' telephone in the early 1990s, probably around 1992. The phone, in black heavy plastic with a glowing green screen that could be seen from outer space was neatly tucked on top of a battery the size of a shoe box and connected by a coil of wire that could be used on the National Grid. Reception was hit and miss to say the least and must have used radio technology which by today's standards I suspect was fairly crude. It weighed a ton, not something you could put in your pocket!

Yet today the technology is remarkable. With a tiny piece of kit weighing just a few grammes, we can talk to someone on the other side of the the earth with a quality as if they were in the next street. How far away is Star Trek technology? When will somebody invent the equivalent of 'warp drive' that will take us to other galaxies - It can't be that far away? But still, we can't solve the problem of the common cold, zippers getting stuck at very inappropriate moments, and why we have little hard bits of dry toothpaste on the end of the tube every morning which we try not to get on the brush?

Here are ten things you could do for fun on the Star Ship USS Enterprise, NCC 1701 D:

• Plug your Nintendo DS into Lt Commander Data;
• Play 'Star Trekking' by The Firm on a loop on the tannoy system and superglue the off switch;
• Put a sign on all the toilets, 'Do not use whilst in orbit;'
• Give Lt Worf a wedgie (and run);
• Ask Captain Picard if he could use a sextant because the computer has gone 'blue screen;'
• Use the shuttlecraft to go to your weekly shop at Nettos;
• Use the photon torpedoes to play space invaders with paedophiles as the targets;
• Wander blindly round the corridors asking the crew if they've seen Luke Skywalker;
• Alter the voice of the computer to talk like Billy Connolly;
• Replace the automatic sliding doors ('shhhhhht') with purple velvet curtains.

Have a great weekend!

Chat soon

Ta-ra