I OCCASIONALLY indulge myself by buying gadgets.
My latest purchase is a dictaphone. This would be useful, I surmised, when taking long journeys alone on motorways. I would be able to spout out random thoughts.
The only drawback is that I rarely travel the motorway and almost never alone. If we are in the car and an idea presents itself, Maria makes a note.
At home she reads the newspapers and takes cuttings for me. “Will that make a piece for the column?” she says – and usually it does.
If I have ideas at night I have a pad and pen next to the bed to write things down in the dark.
The only time this failed to work was when I was in hospital in January. The drugs I was on must have been good because when I looked at my pad the next morning I had scrawled three messages – The 8 Erics; alligators and Spam. And no, I haven’t a clue what they mean.
Anyway, I cannot really see myself waking up in the middle of the night and talking into a dictaphone without provoking comment. “Will you shut up and go to sleep.”
Be that as it may, I now have a neat little gadget that works brilliantly. Well, it has perfectly recorded me saying: “Testing, testing, one two three”, although little else.
When it arrived, however, I did have second thoughts about my carbon footprint. For while the gadget is small and lightweight, it came with 16 sets of instructions in every language from French to Greek. In fact, they were all Greek to me, including the English one.
Like everything these days, manufacturers explain every little nuance of their machines when all I want to know is how to press record, playback and delete – and I worked that out without the need of a manual.
