End of an era for armchair fans and sportsmen as number is finally up for Ceefax "We are all on Ceefax checking out what the other teams are doing," Somerset bowler Ben Phillips admitted towards the end of the 2010 season. Until recently, there was a bank of screens in the pavilion at Lord's, each one showing a different county game. One was rather tempted to suspect that Ceefax was about all the technology the MCC were prepared to countenance. Everyone has a favourite number, be it 302 (football) or 324 (Premier League table) or 341 (the scorecard from the Test match). The page I remember most fondly is 343, where you could follow the cricket in-vision via a little box in the top right-hand corner of the screen while watching your regular programming. This proved a reluctant compromise whenever I was denied the opportunity to watch the cricket by my mother's insatiable passion for Knots Landing. Every crevice of Ceefax oozed charm. Space was limited and highly regimented, but we gratefully accepted what we were given, especially when it led to marvellous headlines such as "PAKISTAN INSIST ON HAIR REMOVAL." Or the admirable way in which its writers were sometimes forced to shoehorn an 11-goal thriller into just four sentences ("Benjani restored the two-goal lead and Niko Kranjcar, Sean Davis and Sulley Muntari sealed victory, with Shane Long and Shorey responding late on.") Ceefax empowered us and at the same time rendered us utterly powerless. The "hold" button, for example, was an immensely useful tool. In contrast to the internet, when information replenishes and decays almost as soon as it is published, holding a page allowed us to suspend time, to preserve the news in aspic for as long as we wished. But for all our myriad options, Ceefax could move no faster than the world did. In age where Sky Plus allows to fast-forward at 24 times regular speed, and YouTube lets us skip to whichever part of a video we want to watch, there was a certain maddening simplicity to being made to wait for something. So I wonder, when we see old and young alike offering their paeans to Ceefax, what exactly it is we are ruing. Is it something so simple as a wistfulness for a bygone age, a time before our worlds became saturated with data, before instant gratification was a treat rather than a birthright? Or is it ourselves? For onto the simple, sober script, and into the interminable pauses while we waited for the next page to load, we projected our own emotions. The anxiety we felt when our team was holding onto a one-goal lead. The crushing despair of yet another England collapse against spin. The wonderful anticipation of not knowing what would come next. These days, of course, everybody knows everything. What we do not know but want to find out, we can learn on a whim. This, I think, is what people will miss most about Ceefax - not knowing, wanting to know, and yet being forced to wait in order to find out. In many ways, it resembles the sense of eagerness that we felt as children. And it was as children, of course, that all of us were first acquainted with this curious, soundless service on the other side of the "text" button. When we mourn Ceefax, if this does not sound overly poetic, we mourn the death of that child and the extinguishing of its sense of wonder. It is nothing more and nothing less than a lament for the passing of time.