My father could well have been born in the Neolithic on the basis of his experience in fire matters, a sustainable use of wild living resources, his woodworking skills or the knowledge he possesses of certain farming techniques. Until electric light came to the house when he was a young boy, fire was the only form of lighting and cooking. The use of electricity to produce light entailed a genuine revolution, and every other new development sprang from it, including the move to digital technology. Unleashed by mechanisation, major transformations happened at the beginning of the 1960s, when I was born. My earliest pictures show a child perched on a cart drawn by a pair of oxen. My grandfather lived the days ox-carts were made entirely of wood, without metal parts, carts that he himself built for fellow neighbours. Many of my old schoolmates are industrial dairy farmers now; some of them even resort to robots for milking their cattle. Since the dawn of agriculture until my father’s childhood years, advances in the rural world had occurred at a steadily increasing pace, nothing like the exponential growth experienced in the transit from his generation to mine. (more…)