At the moment (well, not actually THIS moment - I've taken a break to come here) I'm having a crack at the John H Watson Society Treasure Hunt. It's a Holmesian thing.
I remember in the early 1990s entering my first Holmesian "quiz". Then, research for answers was done almost entirely from books. The bigger your Holmesian/Doylean library, the better the chance you had of finding answers. The process took hours, DAYS! I won a set of the latest Oxford University Press Complete Sherlock Holmes - in hardback. Yay me! It was shipped from the the UK (yes, literally - it came by ship) and took months to arrive.
Later research projects combined book and internet research.
This present "quiz", for better or worse, makes great use of the internet and word-search. Still takes a lot of time and care - and triple checking - but it's different. A different set of skills is required. Not better not worse, just different.
Tonight, I also wanted to check on Wisconsin. That's a town in the USA. Allowing for a keyboard that is starting to repeat keys (press "a" once, get "aaaa"), the entire process took less that four minutes.
I still find it difficult to accept that as the norm, the way things are. I still feel that young'uns should feel fortunate about this and appreciate what they have. I have difficulty in grasping the fact that it is all they've known and it is just normal, not a great advance, so any concept that they've been given something special just doesn't occur to them. It's like me and plane flight, I suppose.
A World Where News Travelled Slowly by Lavinia Greenlaw
It would take from Monday to Thursday
and three horses. The ink was unstable,
the characters cramped, the paper tore where it creased.
Stained with the leather and sweat of its journey,
the envelope absorbed each climatic shift,
as well as the salt and grease of the rider
who handed it over with a four-day chance
that by now things were different and while the head
had to listen, the heart could wait.
Semaphore was invented at a time of revolution;
The judgement of swing in a vertical arm.
News traveled letter by letter, along a chain of towers,
each built within telescopic distance of the next.
The clattering mechanics of the six-shutter telegraph
still took three men with all their variables
added to those of light and weather,
to read, record and pass the message on.
Now words are faster, smaller, harder
…we’re almost talking in one another’s arms.
Coded and squeezed, what chance has my voice
to reach your voice unaltered and then to leave no trace?
Nets tighten across the sky and the sea bed.
When London made contact with New York,
there were such fireworks. City Hall caught light.
It could have burned to the ground.
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