Appreciating the distinction between being wired - and being warm.

In late June, I'll raise a glass to celebrate the Diamond Jubilee of my first trip to Nova Scotia. I was 11, and my parents had so much trust in Canadian National that I made the entire trip from Toronto to Guysborough County all by myself. At 2 a.m., on what was then "Dominion Day," I stepped off a Cape Breton-bound train at Monastery, got into a waiting automobile, and fell asleep the moment my Aunt Bess hugged me. A family friend drove for an hour over winding dirt roads to the farmhouse at Port Shoreham where my father was born.

The next morning I met his mother, Sarah, two more of his sisters, and my cousins Marjorie, Beth and Johnny from the US. I had left a bustling city of nearly a million people to live among a few hard-up coastal farms where the loudest noise was the mooing of cows beyond distant trees, and I would spend every night of the coming summer in the tiny bedroom where my father had slept throughout his own boyhood. Thus began a flirtation with Nova Scotia that would ripen into an attraction so powerful that, at 37, I finally moved here for life.

In that long-gone summer, my relatives and I found ourselves back in the age of kerosene lamps, chamber pots, wood smoke, scythes, stereoscopes and Box Brownie cameras. In the parlour, locked every day except Sunday, were four hard, ugly, Victorian armchairs and a mouse-proof pump organ. We gave the two-holer out back its busiest summer since the reign of Edward VII and, from a well that my great-great-grandfather Richard had dug in the 1840s, fetched water by the bucketful.

We were just visitors. The year-round occupants, carpenter Harry Brown and his wife, Georgie, rented the place from my grandmother, who had moved to Edmonton with Bess. The Browns and, for that one summer, the visiting gang of Bruces, had no central heating, running water or electricity: no vacuum cleaner, washing machine, refrigerator, toaster or buzzing blender. Georgie did all her cooking on a big, black wood-burning stove in the kitchen: a Waterloo, already half a century old, it heated the whole house-too much in summer, too little in winter.

Today's devotees of computers, the Internet, iPods, BlackBerry devices and the other gadgets of the so-called Information Age often gush that, with respect to the emergence of technological miracles, no period in the history of the world can match the last three decades. Remembering the summer of '46, however, I say, "Codswallop!"

OK, so you've bought yourself a gizmo that's no bigger than a deck of cards, and it's not only a wireless phone but also a computer, personal organizer, fax sender, Internet browser, camera and player of music, movies and video games. Well, my techno-geeky friends, I'm here to tell you this: By comparison with the arrival of electricity, indoor plumbing and oil-fuelled furnaces in both homes and workplaces, your multi-functional cellphones are little more than amusing toys. Alongside the invention of automobiles, airplanes, telephones, radios, record players, movies, typewriters, frozen foods, stainless steel, nylon and a mighty range of electricity-driven tools and household appliances, the marvels of our Information Age are considerably less than marvellous.

In 1986, Paul Simon sang, "These are days of miracle and wonder," but he was decades late. Shortly after my first summer at Port Shoreham, Sarah and Bess returned to the homestead for good. My father hired tradesmen to wire the old homestead for electricity, install an oil-burning furnace, and to hook the well up to a system that fed hot and cold water to both the kitchen and a new indoor bathroom.

For Sarah and Bess, these proved-as their lives in Edmonton had already proved-that they were enjoying the real days of miracle and wonder. They were not alone. For technological breakthroughs that forever changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people, the first half of the 20th century hugely outshone the second.