How I miss my version of the laptop Garden of Eden

AM writing this column on a new laptop. It cost me a fair whack at the computer superstore the other day.

- BECKY SHEAVES

It has a beautiful screen that's a million times kinder to my eyes than my last one. The keyboard lights up in a fetching shade of electric blue and it has a terabyte (I think that’s the word) of storage.

So why am I not happier? Well, of all the things I didn’t appreciate at the time or realise I would miss so much, the move from employee to self-employed has meant that I am now pining for a most unlikely person. Danny the IT guy. And before that, Harbans, the other IT guy.

How did I not know at the time how blessed I was, how happy? I was in the laptop Garden of Eden. I just didn’t know it.

Back then, before the fall, if something went wrong, all I had to do was phone Harbans. Or Danny. They would be the ones to scramble around on the floor checking all the leads were properly plugged in. It fell to them to faff around the hard drive of my computer to see what I had done this time. Sometimes it was, indeed, all my fault. Others, as Harbans cheerfully told me, were simply caused by my PC “having a bad day”. They are just like us humans, apparently: “Sometimes they just don’t feel like it,” he said.