The world is a very small place nowadays. You can keep in touch with people on the other end of the Earth with ease and even see how they’re doing — thanks to things like WhatsApp calling, FaceTime and Skype. Technically, these programmes don’t work in the UAE, but if you know your way around, can get hold of a VPN, you’re away to the races.

I remember many years ago, when I was a boy growing up in Ireland, I often heard I had a cousin in Canada. He was always a bit of a mystery and Canada seemed so far away. Cold. Full of bears and Mounties who wore red uniforms. Then Cousin Gus came home for a visit. He had a big hire car, spoke with a funny, twangy accent and was every bit as mysterious as he had been made out to be.

It used to be that when you left to work or seek fortunes in faraway lands, there was little likelihood that you’d be seen again.

The Irish love a good funeral, and a good ‘wake’ is an essential element of any good funeral.

For the uninitiated, a ‘wake’ is a kind of party where all of guests remember the good and tell tales of the deceased. And when a person was going to leave to make better of themselves in New York, Boston or any other city, the family would hold an ‘American wake’. Basically, it was a gathering where all your relatives would tell you what a great person you were, saying all the things they’d say as if you were dead. But of course, you’re not — the sentiment was that they might never see you again. The world, back then, was a very big place.

One of the things that has made the world smaller is the cost of telephone calls. A 10-minute call across the Atlantic would be a fortune. Many a homesick immigrant went near-bankrupt calling home regularly.

Mostly, people wrote letters.

Whatever happened to the light and flimsy air post stationery that as soon as you put a ballpoint pen to, would become a holey mess? And you had to go to the post office and ask for an airmail sticker to go on the flimsy envelope.

Always, there was an intention to write often, but the letters inevitably become further apart.

I used to have an aunt who lived in Italy. She was a prolific writer and my brothers and I would fight to collect the stamp and the envelope. Flimsy airmail envelopes didn’t last a minute with three boys pulling and fighting for the stamp.

You know the world is a smaller place nowadays because there’re very few air mail letters taking days or weeks to be delivered. And no one seems to collect stamps anymore. It used to be that a portion of pocket money each week went to buying a greaseproof paper package of stamps, which would be dutifully adhered into special stamp collection books.

The world is much smaller now because there are so many airlines, so many flights, so much competition, and we all travel so much. What’s the statistic? At any given minute there are a million of us in the air at any one time?

My daughter went to New Zealand for Christmas and the New Year. That’s to the end of the earth. But she still kept in touch, sending back white-water rafting and skydiving photos almost in real time. (Come to think of it, maybe it’s not a good thing to see your daughter jump from a plane ...)

Then she announces she’s off next summer on a gorilla trail to Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. I’m thinking guerrillas, Hutu and Tutsi massacres and Idi Ameen.

I hope the WiFi service is good in these African states. I’m anxious that she’ll keep in touch, Thank heavens I don’t have to wait on a letter ... but I bet the stamps would be cool!