What’s different about being a grandparent today? Your answers

How different is it to be a grandparent today?

When did you last go to a playground with, or “babysit”, a grandchild, without there being a handheld device to interrupt intergenerational communication?
David Turner, Bellevue Heights, South Australia

• Grandparents used to teach their grandchildren, passing on their acquired knowledge. Now grandchildren teach their grandparents, passing on their technological expertise!
Avril Taylor, Dundas, Ontario, Canada

• No need to ask grandma or grandpa: just Google it.
Owen Willis, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada

• The number of grandchildren and therefore fewer birthday and Christmas cards.
Marilyn Hamilton, Perth, Western Australia

• It’s more computerised.
Charlie Bamforth, Davis, California, US

• Not so different. My English grandmother spoilt me by making me pancakes on demand and flipping them in the air with a turn of the wrist. More than six decades later I am delighted to do this for my own granddaughters and to tell them the same stories she told me.
Chris Stevenson, Sydney, Australia

• Being alive!
Fred Fairhead, Erindale, South Australia

I can’t even recall the last one

What is the first book you remember reading all by yourself?

Thomas the Tank Engine, with his bright-coloured friends Gordon, Henry and James, in a book shaped like an autograph album. Or was it Alison Uttley’s Little Grey Rabbit’s Christmas, with the gently falling snowflakes on the cover?
Anthony Walter, Surrey, British Columbia, Canada

• A Billy Bunter or Just William book. When the mobile library came to our south-east London estate, it was survival of the fittest in the rush for the latest edition.
Rhys Winterburn, Perth, Western Australia

• My parents’ photograph album.
Edward P Wolfers, Austinmer, NSW, Australia

• My refugee grandparents struggled, of course: they had no books and my parents could afford to buy very few. I vividly recall a booklet from a ceremony at my first school – a ceremony to honour George VI when he died. I stole that booklet and will never, ever regret doing so.
Donna Samoyloff, Toronto, Canada

• Steady on, it’s hard enough remembering the last book I read.
David Isaacs, Sydney, Australia

• The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby. The abridged version. About age five. Took me a while to realise that all the words ending with -ed were “doing words”. There seemed to be a lot of them.
Jenny Darling, Point Lonsdale, Australia

• It was a Swedish translation of a Just William book by Richmal Crompton. Her stories of a mischievous English schoolboy were hugely popular in Sweden. The books made me an Anglophile.
Reiner Jaakson, Oakville, Ontario, Canada

• Winnie-the-Pooh with wonderful drawings by EH Shepard.
Gillian Shenfield, Sydney, Australia

• I’m too embarrassed to say, but it wasn’t Moby-Dick.
Richard Orlando, Westmount, Quebec, Canada

• An Enid Blyton story about Noddy taking his friend Big Ears for a drive in his car. Despite criticisms of Blyton’s vocabulary and subject matter, they did not prevent my later delight in the world’s great literature.
Margaret Wilkes, Cottesloe, Western Australia

Any answers?

Why do lies have to come in a pack?
R De Braganza, Kilifi, Kenya

Beauty is said to be in the eye of the beholder. What do you see as beauty?
Terence Rowell, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada

Send answers and more questions to weekly.nandq@theguardian.com