I get attached to things, however, and we did have a history together. I remember when I bought it with my first decent book advance. It was new and exciting and the white monitor was really trendy – they usually came in a used chewing-gum colour – so when did it turn that strange yellow, as if it had jaundice? I mean, it wasn’t like I’d ever smoked, so it wasn’t nicotine.

But anyway, the poor thing was slowly dying. It had got Computer Alzheimer’s and got muddled, and that sort of thing was just no good to a professional writer, especially when everyone else, even Linny, was emailing away like mad.

In fact, it was seeing Tertius’s new computer when I’d last visited Linny that made me make up my mind to do something about it, because Tertius’s was see-through and looked as if it had been sculpted from ice: quite beautiful, totally desirable, but horrendously expensive and way out of my league. But it got me thinking, and I finally accepted I’d have to get a proper computer, as I told this really nice man that I ran into down at the Frog and Bubble one lunchtime, where I’d gone with Jackie for a drink. He just happened to have one he didn’t need – brand new, with a flat-screen monitor, too – so of course I said I’d have it.

Jackie tried to put me off, because she said computers emitted negative energy and wouldn’t do my karma any good, but I said not keeping up with technology wasn’t doing my karma much good either, because editors expected you to email your books to them these days and I was starting to look like an antique. She’s older than me, though – the hippie generation – so it’s amazing that Mel turned out such a techno-babe that she thinks the only way of surfing is with a mouse in your hand.

Anyway, I got the money out on the way home, because he’d promised to drop the computer off later at my cottage, and I was walking up the street thinking that I had better get a new keyboard, and maybe a mouse too, when I came face to face with one in the pet-shop window, sitting staring at me through the bars of its cage – a real mouse, that is, all white and pink like the sugar ones I dimly recalled finding at the bottom of my Christmas stocking in the days when I still had a mother …

Well, before I knew what I was doing, I was in the shop parting with even more money, but something just came over me and anyway, she was so terribly sweet that I was sure she was going to be a great inspiration.