The saying, 'necessity is the mother of invention' seems rather less relevant in today's world. If we turn the clock back a century, all manner of life changing inventions were happening, had recently happened, or were about to happen; The telephone, the photograph, the steam engine, the car, the aeroplane, moving picture film, television, the vacuum cleaner, the flushing toilet amongst others were all made available to society's astonished eyeballs in the span of a lifetime.

Chapter XIX

On Sunday, June fourteenth 1970, Albert Windcheater and Tommy Trite marvelled at the advance of technology that allowed live television pictures to be beamed into the living room they were sat in.
The old gents pleaded with young Wilberforce to join them for the evening televisual feast, but the physically and emotionally tortured boy would have none of it.
“We’ve had it now that Banksie’s gone down with that bug.”
Albert was even more worried than when Greavsie was elbowed from the final four years earlier.

"A Vision of Utopia" is a comedy novel exploring the afterlife adventures of a piano teacher. The central character of the story becomes a guardian angel to a reformed alcoholic - and here is a sample (not for the squeamish!)

Chapter Twenty-six

The afterlife is, in the main, a wonderfully utopian experience.

The overriding frustrations of the left behind physical world is now

a distant memory, as combinations of happy meetings with passed-

over friends and relatives, reliving the ghosts of the situations of

Chapter XIII

Mr Leyland kept a studious eye on the assembly as the children made their through We Plough The Fields And Scatter, accompanied by the rocking Miss Hussey on piano.
He was frighteningly similar to Wilberforce’s previous Headmaster, which included an impressive plumage of nasal hair and abhorrence to anything that remotely constituted change. He had clocked up forty-four years service at the school, and for the last twenty-eight of them served as its ruler. He was eight months from retirement.

Chapter XVI

Leonard Loveland, aside from being suave and swarthy, was also unflappable. He was a man who knew how to deal with the stresses of life, and the word panic wasn’t part of his vocabulary. This all changed rather abruptly one day in December 1966.