Eaten alive by his own Kangoo

I've a vague idea that my car is becoming a man-eater. This is due to the steady deterioration of the central locking system. Neither front window will open and two of the door-locks have packed up.

I'm beginning to have a persistent nightmare that one day, it will refuse to let me out via any recognised orifice, squirt digestive juices all over me and simply swallow me alive, pausing only to gob a few scraps of hair and bones out through the exhaust pipe. I'll only be identifiable by dental records and the odd spare tyre.

Doubtless I'm a victim of my own prejudices and cosy memories of plastic windey window handles on cars and other antediluvian devices from a lost and nostalgic world of long ago, when men were men and Morris Minors were not yet being driven at 20mph in the middle of the road by overly-infatuated enthusiasts.

I've tried hard not to become a slave to technology: Look at TV remotes. Originally they were promoted as a means of saving terminally bone idle lard-tubs the bother of staggering three feet across a Barrett House living room to change channels.

These days, one false move down the back of the sofa, no-one can find the buttons and home entertainment as we know it grinds to a halt in a blind panic. Then there's the other buttons for the DVD, the satellite and a Force Ten outside putting the dish into orbit. Me, I walked away from TV, it's become too much like hard work vegging with a can of beer . . .

But I'm just as bad as anyone else. A few days ago my ADSL line went down for a few hours. At which point I realised just how lost I was without the computer: Couldn't access the blog, my website, my email, my clients. Scary.

Of course, what really makes these situations horrific is the Age of Mass Non-Communication:

Technical problems? Please consult our website.

I can't, the ADSL's down. That's why I have a problem.

Well, try our helpline.

You mean the one that's designed to save you money by avoiding talking to me at all costs?

To be ignored completely, please press 5!

(Blankety-blank, silence, nothing, emptiness, mutism, void, vacuum, deep space, out to lunch until the last syllable of recorded time . . . and the one after that)

If I ever discover who invented telephone call stacker systems, it will be worth starting the Revolution just for them . . .

These systems are possibly slightly more unhelpful in French than in English but it's a very fine distinction and nothing to get rabidly anti-French about.

I was astonishingly lucky. France Telecom knew about my fault and were actually in the process of putting it right. It is hard to quantify the magnitude of this particular miracle.

Maybe it's just the ageing process. Being the kind of person who routinely defrosts his fridge with a hammer and chisel (works a treat, by the way . . . especially if you have one of those crap cool-box things that ice up in about 12.8 minutes) perhaps I'm just not fitted for the traumas of hyper-technology.

It's bad enough having to put specs on to tune a guitar or even set the volume on my valve amp (lovely old relic of the steam age, Leo Fender's Rocket) and watching the few remaining shreds of my ever sparse rock'n'roll cool disappearing into the ether or even a passing hyper link.

But this week's retro success has to be rediscovery of the portable cassette recorder. These things are brill. You can take them to a building site (in this case, sunny Rouvenac, home of the living dead or possibly the Grateful Dead), fill them to bursting with dust, plaster and old bricks . . . and they still work!!!

Of course, it means going back to a musical timewarp, a cut-off date after which there were no cassettes. I'd forgotten just how good Thin Lizzy were, and then there was all that wonderful spoken-word stuff from the Beeb: Ian Carmichael is still Live and Dangerous.