Just to lighten the mood & peoples ages has been bandied about lately.

I've a dodgy leg, a metal hip, both knees are shot. My eyesight is not what it used to be, my hearing is bad, memory lets me down at times, but you know what, if I had a wish, it would be bring back my sense of smell & taste to go with it....

What would be your choice?........

Well, jimboy you've got a sprint blue Coop, so I think at least your taste is ok.

I miss playing football,or was it going to the pub after the game,
probably both.

I wish I didn't have to wear glasses, my vision was great up until a few years back. Always seem to be cleaning the blessed things !

On a similar note....

I wish the majority of my DIY related swearing incidents were caused by hitting my finger with a hammer like they used to be as oppose to not being able to read the tape measure without reading glasses, a jewellers loupe and some form of industrial flood light (at noon and in front of a window on a sunny day).

Turns out that mobile phone cameras can get in close on the vernier scales, so I can zoom the picture and read the measurement.

Of course, I *could* fork out fifteen quid for a digital calliper, but where's the fun in that?

No fun at all. Another reason to stick with an old-school vernier is that no-one will swipe them. When I used to work in industry the digital ones would always get borrowed and go walkies whereas the proper ones didn't. Presumably because people were either too lazy to read them or didn't know how to.

Same argument for slide rules and log tables, kids these days (and a large number of adults) don't even know what they are

I have a tape measure in my hand for a fair bit of my working day,it's bad enough having to wear glasses but tag along with that buckets of sweat pouring down my face most days in this French climate.
Well it makes things uncomfortable.

Oh along with failing body joints.

Yup - a bad back and gradually worsening near-vision are my main whinges.

The glasses thing is just a bloody inconvenience, as my vision is pretty good after about six feet or so. If I'm working on the car, its glasses on to see what I'm tinkering with, glasses off to walk into the garage the toolchest to pick the socket - glasses on again to look at the socket sizes, glasses off to walk back to the car, glasses on again to see the bolt, glasses off again to walk back to the toolchest to find the correct socket, etc, etc.....

For other people, including my long-suffering wife, the main problem with my ageing is my whinging about glasses and my bad back....

LOL this made me laugh and reminded me of my own experience- a few years ago I underwent laser eye surgery because I needed glasses but was always leaving them on my desk. When a 999 shout came out I would run to the car, and then have to run back to the office to get my glasses. I thought I would overcome this through surgery, and went for mono vision where one eye interprets close things (reading) and the other interprets distance. Job done.

Everything was great until the next eye test I had for response driving- as I failed the test and discovered both eyes have to be the same standard. So I ended up with a glasses prescription again, only this time with different lenses on each side...doh!

Roll those Napier's Bones!

Not heard of them before, but kind of quirky, and I note that they came after the abacus and before the slide rule...

Glasses for me, too.

On to look at damage on car, off to cross workshop to get spectrometer, on to read spectrometer, off to fetch sander, etc. Trouble is, I can't be bothered to keep on taking them off and just look over the glasses, leading to all kinds of tripping over airlines and cables amusement.
Or I set off driving before realising that the SatNav and speedo are the only things in focus...

And it would be nice to be able to do an entire job without having to use the customer's loo twice...

Well, indeed; the same chap did a lot of work formalising logarithms, and that led to the slide rule.

What about celestial navigation which uses a sextant and books of tables, and star charts.

Now, we just look at the GPS which indicates where one is on the planet.

I have been told that the Royal Australian Navy is reintroducing instruction on celestial navigation as there is a treat that satellites could be altered/turned off which makes navigation at sea using GPS a bit difficult.

When I first started Ocean Racing many years ago it was all "pencil and paper" and, if one was lucky, one had an NC77 to do the calculations of the "sights". Now one is required to have two GPSs on board plus charts. Taken a lot of fun out of doing navigation with our DR (Dead Reckoning) position.

Latitude is easy; you just need a protractor. But for longitude you need John Harrison to invent a clock that keeps accurate time - which is why Britain ruled half the world: it knew where it was.

(one of my favourite science fiction quotes: "They're invading aliens with starships and nuclear bombs. We've got a protractor...")

When I went to sea as an apprentice deck officer that was all there was for deep sea navigation apart from some of western European waters covered by Decca navigator, itself a development of wartime "Gee"

I doubt whether I could actually see well enough to do a star fix these days but I expect that I could still work my way through Right Ascension, measured from the 1st Point of Aries, Declination, knowing the correct time and using Napierian logs to find my position on the globe.

I am horrified that Possum said that the RAN is re-introducing celestial navigation: Electronic gear breaks down, pencils don't.

But they do go blunt at critical moments...

That's another reason why I carry a folding knife on my person.