I had to buy a new phone this week.

What they don’t warn you in the shops is that you’ll have to remember every password for every app you have. 

Having unsuccessfully tried Gerd Müller’s birthday, Alan Knott’s wedding anniversary and the square root of two, the words I no longer wish to see are “forgotten password?”.

Before phones etc., the last time I needed a password was in the early ‘70s, doing Am Dram in a Balham church hall, saying the words, “Open Sesame”.  (This would have been good if we were performing Aladdin; sadly, we were doing King Lear).

I never did CCF at school (I visited old ladies in Clapham, which was far more dangerous than being on a school field with fellow sixteen-year-olds with pretend guns), so I never had the chance to say, “Who goes there?”.  The key to getting into the houses of the old ladies was to simply answer “yes” to the question “Is that you, Mick?”.

The most complex thing you had to remember growing up was the combination on your bike’s padlock.

Back when we were kids, you didn’t have to invent a special word using upper and lower cases, a selection of numbers and liberal use of asterisks, exclamation marks and semi-colons.  Once I’ve mastered a way to remember such things, I shall be applying to work at Bletchley Park and you can all start calling me Alan Turing!