Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ

Michelle Hanson's finding it a little difficult getting to grips with the latest technology...

My printer has broken down. So I bought another one. It looked all right to me. It had a cable and a plug. I thought you could just plug it in and bingo! Printing could begin again. Silly me. The new printer won't work because my computer is too old and no new printer on earth will ever match it again.

But my computer is only eight years old. That's what I call new. To me, old means a manual typewriter or a quill pen. But not anymore. Now new means last week when someone invented something a widdly bit different, ninety times more complicated and clever-dick than what we all have already, so the rest of the world has to junk everything, shell out and update.

But I shan't, and what's more, I don't have to. Firstly because there's a man round the corner who promises that one day he will find me a printer that will fit my elderly equipment, if I can wait. Yes I can wait. Anything rather than upgrade, because what does upgrade mean? It means change everything, just when I've got the hang of it after years of effort, and now at last I can cut and paste, insert, edit, e-mail, copy and nearly understand the bits in the boxes, and my friends Jennifer and Whitters ring and ask me for advice, and now I'll have to start all over again. No thank you very much.

Poor Whitters has been told he must have broadband so he can download quicker. What does that mean? Whitters explains in the old language. "You know, when you press a button and then the information appears, but on mine I can cook roast potatoes while I'm waiting, so the wife says we need to speed up a bit."

Last week my neighbour across the road in the real world gave me a mountain of bananas. "Got any recipes for banana bread," I asked my friend Brian, thinking he might reach for a cookery book, but no. Off he went to the web to download every banana recipe on earth.

What a nightmare! We are swamped with information and equipment that we don't need and cannot work. Back in his ordinary living room, Whitters cannot even set his video. If he needs to record a late film he must stay up till 2.a.m. because he hasn't yet mastered the timer. "You ought to be able to do it," drone the wife and daughters. "You're a man!"

But they are wrong. Even girls must be able to do it nowadays. I can't have a fluffy panic and call the nearest bloke to help out. No one will stand for it. I must learn to work the microwave, the video recorder, the car radio and its memories, call waiting, the oven and thermostat timers, automatic everything and learn not to scream while waiting for automated switchboards and listening to everything winking and pipping and bleeping, and worst of all, learn to use a mobile telephone, with its horrid little widsy buttons, so I can grow brain tumours, get mugged and tell the world my private life while out and about.

Really I would like to be at home scratching away with my heavenly lever-filled italic Osmiroid pen. How tragic that I've just lost the only one I have left, and it is irreplaceable. The lever pen is no more.

But I'm just sitting crying over my lost pen and lamenting the advent of cartridges when my American Cousin rings. She is thrilled to bits with new technology, because her son in America has just e-mailed her a picture of her new, darling, twenty-minute old grandson, digitally reproduced. Sounded marvellous. For a moment I nearly gave in and asked Brian to search the whole of cyberspace for an Osmiroid.

But Jennifer stopped me. "How wet," she cried. "How could you! What's the matter with deferred pleasure? And there are pen shops in Central London." Quite right. I shall drive there on my horse and cart.