With Christmas round the corner and the amount of trashy television programs surfacing, I can’t get help but get a little excited because some of my favourite kinds of shows come on. Yes there is the standard Christmas movies that get me all excited like Die Hard, The Grinch and Miracle on 34th Street, one of my favourites by the way, but the yearly roundup shows and revisiting decades gone by such as the 90’s and 00’s are shown.

It’s these shows that give us a glimpse at what it was like to grow up in the 80’s, 90’s or 00’s and what got me thinking about the days before mobile phones and laptops were readily available and when you had to pay huge amounts of money for very little talk time or texts. If I remember rightly, when I got my first contract phone at 17, a burnt orange coloured Nokia 8210, it was something like £35 a month for either 100 or 200 minutes and 50 texts. And that was cheap when you compared it to Pay As You Go tariffs.

As I think back, my very first phone was a BT Cellnet U phone which was a very rounded phone, with big round plastic number buttons that you really had to press in, along with the different coloured bands you could have on your aerial! Yes mobile phones had aerials when they first came out! Now you got texts between other BT Cellnet U phone numbers for 5p a text and calls for 10p a minute. Soon as you text any other network, it was something like 40-50p a minute for calls and texts were 50p a text, so you really had to think carefully about who you were texting and were they worth the money. Remember at 15/16 years old(1999 /2000), 50p was a lot of money, or at least it was for me.