Absolute blast

My computer gave up the ghost last week. I bought it in 1999 and in recent months it has felt a bit like one of those clapped-out spaceships in Dr Who, held together only with wire and willpower as you force it through the space-time continuum. Normally such technical failure would reduce me to fury or tears or both, but I’ve remained eerily calm. I’ve been living on borrowed time for months, and there is a kind of peace about not feeling a constant need to check your emails. I have however missed the web, six words I thought I would never write.

But if high tech has died in the home, it was much in evidence in Swindon at the weekend, an almost unimaginably horrible town of multistorey car parks, desolate shopping centres, wall-to-wall chavs and a traffic system apparently designed by a malign lunatic. We were there to fight laser battles in a dark maze adjoining an internet café at my nephew’s birthday party. Surprisingly good fun it was, too, until an adult male unknown to any of us entered the murky labyrinth and started zapping the children with unpleasant relish. No doubt his intentions were innocent and good-humoured but I experienced a nasty attack of paedo-paranoia and kept my eye on the blighter. In this suspicious and nannyish age, I’m surprised that lone adults are allowed to haunt such places. Of course if he’d been smoking he’d have been out on his ear in an instant with a hefty fine to pay.

The excitements in Swindon meant I missed the start of the TV coverage of the Concert for Diana. Most of the acts didn’t look that promising and I’ve always felt I belonged to the Prince of Wales’s Party rather than Diana’s.