NOW that we are truly into a new millennium, as the Queen usefully reminded us, I find I have become part of an "underclass'' - a source of concern to our caring Government.

I am on the wrong side of what it calls the "digital divide''. In other words I'm not on the Internet, and therefore technologically deprived.

I'm not going to say what you expect - a pox on the Internet. Eventually, I am sure, everyone of us will be linked up, and will take information from the Net as routinely as we now draw water from a tap. But at the moment I can't perceive any compelling need worth the bother and cost, slight though they might be, of joining "the Web''.

OK, I might be able to book a train more easily, assuming there are trains to book and safe to travel on. I could probably get a list of holiday cottages in Fowey, a favourite holiday haunt, or check out the availability of jazz CDs, another of my interests. But I manage all these things satisfactorily as it is. And surfing the Net has no appeal to me. My life is full enough now. What would I sacrifice to spend time "visiting" - absurb word - computer-screen "sites"?

So the Government's solicitude on my behalf is entirely misplaced. I think it needs a few of us to point out that life can still be lived fully without this technological revolution. And of course the irony of the Government's position is that, like all governments, it doesn't really want us to be closely informed in one very vital area - what the Government itself is up to. For that, the best source of information remains what it always has been - the daily papers.

THOUGH I also don't own a mobile phone, the case for having one - the lifesaving case of course - is far stronger than for being on the Internet. To me, a dilemma is that when I go out, especially for a walk, one of the things I want to get away from is the phone. But once you have a mobile it seems essential that it is switched on - otherwise that possibly life and death call, might come when it is off. The mobile thus imposes a kind of tyranny.

But we'll all have one ere long. And a fine mess Britain will look then. Today's rapidly-expanding usage demands 50,000 more masts. Can we afford to wreck our countryside for the garbage which will account for the vast majority of calls?

The Tories don't think so. Environment spokesman Archie Norman says: "All over Britain there is a proliferation of mobile phone masts.'' He predicts that "within the next five years there will not be a location in the English countryside out of site of ugly masts.''

So the Tories plan to introduce strict planning controls. But it was the Tories under Thatcher who, to boost the mobile phone industry, scrapped the planning requirement for masts under 50ft and eased those for taller masts. I wonder if you could get that fact on the Internet? It comes from my personal memory bank.

WHETHER paraglider Brett De La Mare, who dropped into Buckingham Palace, is related to the poet Walter de la Mare has not been revealed. But what a pity that the police swooped on the intruder before he had time to hammer on the Palace's front door and utter the opening words from de la Mare's best-known poem, The Listeners, which begins: "Is there anybody there? said the Traveller....''

THE BBC is shunting around its senior journalists. Margaret Gilmour from environment to home affairs, media man Torin Douglas confined to radio, presenter Karen Allen from News 24 to the evening bulletin, and so on. No mention of Kate Adie. If she is still chief news correspondent, perhaps the BBC will soon find some chief news for her to report, as she has been invisible for months. Even the recent floods, it seems, didn't rank as chief news.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/news/ mead/htm