I first saw a mobile phone at a seminar in Auckland sometime in the 1980s. A man arrived lugging - somewhat self-consciously – an object which looked like a car battery with a phone receiver perched on top of it. An urgent and excited whisper ran round the room - “.... a mobile phone ... it’s a mobile phone!” 
We all gawped as its owner considerately tucked the object under his chair so that no one would stub their toes on it or trip over it. At the first tea break, this fabled machine and this man (who we would now call an “early adopter”) was immediately the centre of an awed cluster of onlookers. I remember thinking that I would never be well-enough off to afford such a machine or the extraordinary per-minute cost of using one.  

I got up, after an only mildly insomniac night, to a gorgeous autumn morning and ingested my first two tablets of the day, before toasting a slightly aged Easter bun for breakfast. 
Several vast mugs of tea and another tablet later, confident of a pain-free day thanks to modern pharmaceuticals, I drove to the Positive Aging Expo at the Headingly Centre in Richmond. Welcomed at the entrance by the cheerful strains of an electronic organ, I joined the throng which ambulated, Zimmered or were wheeled along the aisles of products and services on display. Only God knows what combination and quantity of pharmaceuticals there were circulating in our collective veins but we were all terribly upbeat in spite of the fact that everything on display - with the possible exception of the “Miracle Chopping Board” and the model train, screams ill health, infirmity and decline.