My computer is dead. The handsome Mr Duffy got himself locked in the home office in the middle of the night - long story – decided that the only way to get out was to tear around all over the furniture like a mad thing. And he knocked a large external hard drive and the laptop off the desk. The laptop fell on the hard drive and its keyboard is bashed in. Now, instead of that reassuring Mac chime – all it did was make a plaintive little squeak, and died.

Of course, my back-up using Apple’s superb Time Machine is right up to date – but the standby machine is too old to run it. I can’t access my files until the new machine arrives. And some crucial software I use every day is too new (even though it’s not THAT new) to run on the old machine.

So for the first time in ages I feel cut off from the world – I’m a writer, I don’t use the phone, I write. And I get used to the email software pulling email addresses from the address book and never needing to remember them – but that address book is not now accessible. So if you’re waiting to receive a response to an email – I’m sorry, as of now I can’t access it and can’t remember your email address.

It sounds feeble, doesn’t it, the cat killed my laptop. Like that old schoolboy standby: the dog ate my homework. (Came across this cartoon showing an alternative solution!) Talking of homework excuses, I remember a kid in my class at school arriving at school on a sunny summer day drenched from head to toe and with an empty school bag: he said he couldn’t hand in his homework cos his bike had hit a rock as he cycled along the river and he’d fallen in and his homework was swept away. Wouldn’t you rather just do the homework than deliberately ride your bike into the river?

Off to see the insurance company now…