I THINK it must be an age-thing. I was perusing the national newspapers on the Internet the other day and was a little puzzled. There was someone from CBB who I had never heard of, who had broken up with someone else on Strictly who I had never heard of, because he had started to date a TOWIE star, who I had never heard of, behind her back.

Apparently it went on while she was on CBB and her former lover, now dubbed Love Rat, was chatting up his new new love who was hoping to debut on Splash. It seemed like there is some kind of orgy or partner swapping on cheap tv, all undertaken in text-speak.

I was only attracted to read this tawdry episode in the every-day life of supposed stars, because I spotted these initials. I pondered the TOWIE star reference and thought I had better get to the bottom of it, not because I was interested, but because I might come across TOWIE again in a significant context.

I was wrong there, but I did finally work out it stood for The Only Way Is Essex and that CBB is Celebrity Big Brother, neither of which we bother to watch. I admit I have watched CBB, when I thought it was Celebrity Big Brother, some years back and found it rather tedious. It also confirmed an impression that Ant and Dec were definitely not to my taste.

Ellie has watched Strictly (Strictly Come Dancing) and quite enjoyed it. I suspect if she was that enamoured she would watch it: we do have three televisions in the house, but to date she has remained with me, apart from when the football comes on.

As for me, I was never into dancing. I attended Freda Newell Jones in Watford, back in the early 60s but could never truly feel the rhythm of the rumba, tango, waltz etc and it was not until the mid-60s that I managed to propel my 6ft 5inch frame round a disco floor roughly in time with the music. It was quite uplifting and I do feel that beat, but the sound of the tango, waltz, rumba or the foxtrot only speeds me to the bar for a refresher.

I digress. Apart from those dances, there are a lot of television programmes with which we do not bother: Bake off, Dinner Date and other forms of cheap television. That probably confirms it is an age-thing as we enter the era in which we are labelled Grumpy Old Man and Woman.

There may be more choice nowadays, but the appeal of television has fallen away in our house, yet I note that many houses I visit have the television on from morning to night as if it were a compulsory adjunct to everyday life.

It is like Facebook and Twitter. I cannot imagine being a journalist now and having to trawl through all the observations made by various sports people within our locality to see if there was anything worth reporting on.

I did join Facebook years ago because I noted Dion, an old rock favourite of mine, was answering questions on his” wall”, a term I had to get my head round, briefly imagining him whitewashing messages in the garden of his Florida home. I managed to find it and watched for his answers to questions but I tired of the exercise because so many people wanted to be my “friend”. I am in contact with my friends and among the many others who asked, there were some I would not invite into my house, let alone my computer screen.

I have returned to Facebook more recently and gained knowledge vicariously about what is going on among people I know but I do find it amazing, even as a retired person, that they have the time to write so much every day trivia. Even more surprising is that other people comment upon it.

I do not for a moment consider myself living a boring life and I am certainly not bored in retirement. It is up to others to consider as to my ability to bore, but I have to think hard what to write in this column every week. To consider writing something almost every day on what happened to me beyond bowel movements and dog walking, defies my imagination and I cannot think of any of my real friends would bother to read it.

However, each to his own, but a different world and like anyone past working age, I find it difficult to fathom at times.

I think back to my youth and think of the days when we did not have a phone and later when we had a shared phone with someone unknown to us. It was called a party line. You would pick it up, hear someone talking and then replace the receiver in order to try later. We had to share because there were not enough phone lines to Chipperfield. Then we had a phone of our own and we considered we were in the avant-garde of communication.

Even so, my mother did not feel compelled to phone up friends and inform them she had just taken a super-looking joint out of the over.

Thinking of those old days and the reference to television, I recalled that on Friday nights in the early 1950s there was a programme called Kaleidoscope, which included Ronnie Walden’s Puzzle Corner. No one I know seems to recall this, apart from some buffs on the web, who would testify to the accuracy of my memory. I think the cameraman was called Fotheringey and he would go to a town and take some moving footage of life in that area, while the voice over by Waldman would give us background details.

During the broadcast he would make a deliberate mistake and it was up to viewers to spot it. Many viewers did including this bloke from Harrow who cracked it every week and would send in an elaborate and often imaginative working model, demonstrating the mistake.

I remember as a child being quite depressed because not only did I struggle to spot the mistake, but I could not imagine coming up with such a concept as his models, let alone the confidence to submit it in time for the next programme.

But I have grown up since then. I know what TOWIE means. Yo!