I’ve gone on a bit about electricians. I would now like to talk about cupboards. One particular cupboard. It’s a cupboard in the corner of my study, and I daren’t go into it, because I know that if I go into it I will not emerge till the end of the afternoon and I will emerge from it a sad and embittered man who has done battle with a seething black serpentine monster and lost. The seething black serpentine monster is a three-foot-high pile of cables, and it both taunts me and haunts me. It taunts me because it knows that whatever cable it is that I want at any particular moment to connect one particular arcane device to another particular arcane device is not to be found anywhere in its tangled entrails, and it haunts me because I know it’s right.

I hate cables. They hate me too, because they know that one day I will simply be able to go into that cupboard with a flamethrower and get rid of the lot of them. In the meantime they are determined to extract from me the last ounce of frustrated misery that they can. We do not need the bastards. We shouldn’t need the bastards.

Take my current situation as an example. In order to be safe from Frank the Vandal, I have transferred this article onto my portable Mac (I know, I know, you hate me. Listen. We’ll all have one in the end. They’ll bring the price down, trust me. Or rather, don’t trust me, trust Apple. Well, yes, I see your point. Please can I get back to what I was saying anyway?) and I have taken the additional precaution of taking it round to a friend’s house which is entirely electrically isolated from anything that Frank may be up to.

When I get back home with the finished piece, I can either copy it onto a floppy disk, assuming I can find one under the debris of half-finished chapters on my desk, then put that into my main Mac and print it (again assuming that Frank hasn’t been near my AppleTalk network with his chainsaw). Or I can try to do battle with the monster in the cupboard till I find another AppleTalk connector somewhere in its innards. Or I can crawl around under my desk and disconnect AppleTalk from the IIx and connect it to the portable. Or . . . you get the picture, this is ridiculous. Dickens didn’t have to crawl around under his desk trying to match plugs. You look at the sheer yardage of Dickens’s output on a shelf and you know he never had to match plugs.