I'm no computer expert. I can't tinker with the bolier rooms of websites. Java's for drinking, not scripting. I've sat through tuition on Dreamweaver and been shocked by how hit and miss, see if it sticks the whole process of web design is, or at least appears to be. Sure, I can do a bit of html code, but that's as deep as my knowledge goes.

I've just spent the best part of three hours, on two different computers, trying to get an online auction going on eBay. Specifically, I've tried to set a reserve price on a lot. Forgive my old-fashioned thinking, but I don't think an auction is an auction without a reserve price. If you don't care how much you get, you're begging.

Anyway, this most popular of ecommerce sites, a system that children use daily, that cranially damaged spud-a-likes hooked to lung pumps sail through, transforms into a labyrinth of frustation and despair at my fingertips. This happens to me a lot. I have access to a top of the line machine, the broadest of bandwidths and a decent brain. Yet much of the worlwide web is a closed box. I can't post a video to YouTube without it stretching and squashing to the wrong aspect ratio. I can't get my head round Photoshop, Flash or Firefox. I recently found that out neither BitTorrent not iChat actually work at all, except as space fillers on my hardrive. I don't subscribe to any RSS feeds and, as previously outlined, find Facebook unrelentingly naff.

The gap is widening. Within the next decade I'll be the digital equivalent of Adam Adamant, hopelessly unmoored from comtemporary life, hamfistedly trying to ram my usb dongle (and what cretin coined that particular gem, pray?)into the most intimate neural wet ports of a 700 tetrabyte, wah-fuhr theen zMac Ghost or whatever the hell.

Oh, double balls and bollocks.