AN IN-LAW observed while my proud-as-punch young daughter fed her baby cousin his bottle at the weekend that it was not a Kodak moment. There will never be another Kodak moment.
The US multinational, synonymous with family snaps, is back in business but as a skeleton version, a ghost even, of its former self.
It emerged from bankruptcy last month after being overtaken by digital photography. Tens of thousands of jobs and pensions wiped out and it no longer makes either cameras or the rolls of film it pioneered in the 19th century that brought photography to the masses in the first place.
If now your ma asks you to 'fix' her smart phone, in my day she'd ask you to load her camera film because it was too fiddly. Tactile today is tapping a screen, then it was spooling film until the wee notches at the top and bottom of the roll caught on the winding sprockets.
These already read like words from the steam age but it was normal life last time your uncle Fergal bought a new pair of Wranglers, kids.
We had drinks for departing colleagues recently. Staff get-togethers involving alcohol, now rare, always bring up reminiscences about the way things used to be - and the time-frame for what constitutes 'used to be' gets shorter every time there's a get-together.
"Do you remember drinking at lunchtime?" someone asked.
So-and-so used to have a few beers every day and then come back and do an afternoon's work, apparently. Which explained a lot. And the printers would go to the bakers' club on the way home from a night shift and be full first thing in the morning.
Or evening tea-break for sub-editors, spent in The Front Page across the street, the paper put to bed, as they say, with everyone a pint or two to the good. As they say. (Perhaps a taxi driver I met in my first weeks in Belfast was wise to this when he told me that if someone's name appeared in The Irish News deaths pages, "they're still in with a chance".)
Do you remember drink-driving? Or drink-driving with no seatbelt while smoking a pipe?
Or, to broaden it out lest you think the old days means solely the booze days in my mind, do you remember hitch-hiking?
When you wanted to get from A to B but preferred to save your money for - oh, I don't know - a few large bottles of Harp?
Hitch-hiking is confined to gap years now so were it not for the rise of video games, thumbs would surely have been for the evolutionary chop.
Do you remember when respectable middle-class people used to make their own wine, big glass jars of it bubbling away in the hot press?
Why not - yet the idea seems quaint and ridiculous. Do you remember Honda 50s, the standard mode of transport of wellie-wearing ould fellas in the countryside? Now motorbikes are sleek-looking beasts and ould fellas are in homes.
Do you remember shaking salt on your dinner? Instant coffee? Double parking? Flat caps? The sound of a pressure-cooker whistling? Or exploding? The noise made by the office fax machine? (Obsolete for what seems like a century in technological terms now, yet you wouldn't believe the number of companies that include a fax number in the contact details at the bottom of their - wait for it -- emails.)
What about ham sandwiches that had nothing in them but ham, cheese sandwiches with nothing but cheese? When's the last time you picked up a phone, dialled the operator (Would you know the number? Do operators still exist?) and said: "I'd like to reverse the charges, please"?
For the past five years the news has been dominated by the recession, the financial downturn, the credit crunch, job losses, home repossessions, businesses going to the wall, a collapse in consumer spending.
But in all that time have you darned a sock? Do you know anyone, in this generation, who has ever darned a sock or even sewn a button back on? Does anyone patch holes in their jeans any more?
Never mind the fact that hobo-ing hasn't made a comeback since 2008, I'm certain there are young people who have never heard of the concept of repairing clothes. So can we really be all that badly off?