At the onset of the internet, a pundit remarked that future society would be divided between the computer-literate and those who failed to keep up. What was the outcome of that prediction?

Since the onset of the internet and hi-tech information sharing internet-dependent sheeple have become as dumb as medieval swine herders. If you like challenges then prove me wrong if you can.

Put your mind into reverse for a moment: the average child attending a state school in 1900 was far better educated and informed, much more worldly aware than are university graduates, media editors and politicians today. They won’t test this statement because they know that the bookish generations win hands-down.

What is beyond dispute is that book readers are still the smartest of the crop when it comes to all matters. Books change men and history, book reading turned ordinary men and women into pioneers. Book readers are the mainstay of every European source onset of genius. Again, prove me wrong.

On an ordinary level, being a book reader, I found myself in verbal jousting with a man old enough to be my father. Yet, at 95-years of age, he had lived life to the full and in fact, he had packed more into his life than a lesser 100 men.

Yes, he was well informed and he could hold an audience. But during our conversation, I impressed him and I constantly bettered him. Why, because unlike my sprightly companion my choice of reading dared to go beyond what we are told is conventional.

You will find similar triumphs when you attend groups and gatherings on a social level. Read the RIGHT books if you want to impress. There will be constant consternation but when you deliver the coup de grâce with a devastating fact from a politically incorrect book you will gain respect and self-respect.

Book sales for us are never as we would like them to be but the hard work that goes into promoting book sales is satisfactory whilst things could and should get better.

Here, scattered through this end of the month catch-up that the literati more enquiring and better-informed look forward to (or not) are a few ideas for treating yourself, your friends and your family.

Window shopping is free and all books are guaranteed to be Covid free and untouched by human malice or censorship.

QUOTE OF OUR SAD TIMES: ‘I’m upset that we’ve lost the ability to live peacefully: writing watercolours, playing the piano, hosting guests, keeping diaries, having picnics. Why are we missing all this time? Why can’t I come to a person without calling before and make sure they’re happy about me? What’s everyone so busy with?

‘Pushkin, Mussorgsky, Mayakovski also worked like crazy, but they had time left to communicate with people, entertainment, secular life, even to get drunk.

‘And then this impudent and scoundrel Edison ruined everything: a gramophone, the light bulb, the phone, these are terrible inventions. They ate our time. I remember the times when I wrote letters, worked hard, had leisure, and then I went to the technically equipped West, and the hours, days, years began to flow through my fingers.’ ~ Otar Ioseliani, filmmaker, screenwriter, actor.