You’d be hard pushed in this day and age not to be touched by social media and while I am a bit of a tech dinosaur, I do enjoy my Facebook and whatever Twitter is called this week.

I’ll get to Instagram and the other ones in the near anon, or maybe I won’t.

Like many of us, my mobile phone seems to be another appendage and although I don’t use it as much as some for actually phoning people, I love whipping it out and taking photographs to post on social. There will always be a journalist in me, fighting to get out.

As a man who enjoys his nostalgia, I follow several sites relating to old things like football strips, railway engines, ships, maps, buildings and the like, which showed how things were back in the day when life was undoubtedly better.

It never ceases to amaze me how one’s mental photographic archive can be triggered by someone posting a picture they found in an old shoe box in their granny’s house.

And this week, as we are snowed under with those pictures of our children’s first day at school or last day of the holidays, or both, I had my head turned by something bizarre and not altogether wholesome.

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One of the pages I follow, because I am interested in the railway, history and railway history, is one devoted to the so-called Great Train Robbery in 1963, when a bunch of London crooks stopped the overnight mail train from Glasgow to London and relieved it of cash amounting to many millions of pounds at today’s values.

The incident happened at a bridge over a side road near Tring, and when I was once on an Army exercise at nearby RAF Halton, I got out my Ordnance Survey map and compass and sought it out.

As bridges go it is unremarkable. It is much the same as any other, I would argue, but there is no doubt it is unique because it has a special place in infamy.

My normally benign Facebook page filled up this week with pictures of the bridge showing shady looking characters driving vintage Jaguars and sporting shades and pork pie hats. Their rendezvous was to mark the 60th anniversary of the heist.

Seeing how yesterday’s violent criminals were lauded online today as heroes standing up to the establishment and cocking a snook at law and order, while everybody else paid their taxes and got on with it, really irked me.

When someone posted that they should hold a two-minute silence for those gang members no longer with us, I did what I should have done much earlier and hit the snooze button.