COMPUTERS and I are not best friends. The relationship I have with these complex but ultimately inanimate devices is love-hate, which I admit is a bit odd since a computer is nothing more or less than a tangle of electronic connections with some human interfaces like a keyboard for your fingers and a screen for your eyes.

My present computer – and all those before it right back to my long-deceased Sinclair ZX Spectrum – don’t care one jot whether I love them or hate them.

For those of you who don’t remember ZX Spectrums, the best way to describe them would be to say that they had the computing power one tenth of a lobotomised amoeba.

A computer, of course, is a rather old-fashioned way of talking about modern electronic devices and I’m doing so just to annoy all the people who are now superglued to laptops, pods, pads, notebooks and Bilberries (or whatever).

I love a computer’s speed and efficiency. As one who deals in information and lots of it, I love its storage capacity and the rate with which it delivers that information almost instantly from the darkest corners of its own innards and from the world of knowledge at large through those wondrous things, search engines.

Even those who don’t use or know or care about computers must look in awe at the impact they’ve had on our way of life.

For me, that awe is tinged with despair and frustration.

In the last five years I have had two computer hard drives destroy themselves and all the information they have contained.

My hard drives crashed completely without warning. Many people use a computer all the time without having a hard drive crash at all.

It almost goes without saying they crashed at the furthest point from the automatic back-up point, according to the Jam Side Down, Murphy’s and Sod’s Laws.

Clearly, this does not dispose me to trust the things and actually makes me think that computers and I are ill-matched partners.

Pip, who has her own laptop, much prefers me not to be in the same room as her when she fires hers up. “Don’t look at it,” she says. “You’ll make it go wrong.”

A hard drive is the very heart, the absolute gubbins, of a computer. It is the bit that stores and processes everything you have – all your photos, videos, diary notes, spreadsheets, presentations ... so when a hard drive goes it takes with it everything you’ve entrusted to the machine.

I suppose I got off lighter than my sister-in-law whose drive crashed and took with it a significant chunk of her PhD research, setting her back perhaps two years.

My photos and videos go on to CDs or DVDs. When I remember, I back up the back-up by saving everything on those cunning little devices they call memory sticks or flash drives.

This isn’t after every time I work on the computer. And therein lies the problem. You have a copy of what you’ve done but its infuriatingly out of date when you really need it.

My sister-in-law and I now have software that automatically saves our stuff every few seconds to something called the ‘cloud’, a godlike concept if ever there was one.

If (deity forbid) either machine crashes, we can theoretically reach up into the ‘cloud’ and drag every last syllable back down like Moses and his tablets.

Of all the devices I use, the flash drive (pictured below) is the most depressing.

I have downloaded my encyclopaedia of deities’ names, my poetry, songs, two completed books and four works in progress, all my correspondence, diaries, essays, articles, quiz questions – hundreds of thousands of words, essentially a lifetime’s work, onto a thing smaller than a lipstick.

And the thing has the nerve to tell me it still has four gigabytes of storage space.

How long does it think I'm going to live?