Well, how marvellously modern this is. Here I sit, tapping away at my tolerably tiny laptop in a coffee shop in Covent Garden. I've even connected to the internet, spurning the pay-as-you go offering of Cafe Nero in favour of the free connection of the hotel next door. Wonder if they make any money on wireless browsing in here...

Something that I could be even more flash about is the fact that I'm using a Tablet PC. These have attracted much derision as another doomed Microsoft initiative (such as, say Smart Displays) and I have been a mite sceptical myself. Now that I'm using it, however, I am a changed man: it's great. You can drag it round just like a normal laptop, but whenever you want to do the hasty-scribble notepad thing, just flip the screen round and start writing. It's just as easy as taking regular notes, with the advantage that I'm exponentially more likely to actually convert them into usable stuff - I keep all my old notebooks, but only once in a blue moon can I ever be bothered to go through them and find the line of illegible scrawl that holds the relevant bit of info. Here I can just rely on the (admittedly not-perfect) recognition to convert it all, and then I've got my choice of desktop search tool to go through it without having to rely on my increasingly poor memory.

Plus, even this fairly anonymous example impresses the hell out of people. If I had the oh-so-gorgeous HP I'd be surrounded by drooling women, depend upon it. Or prematurely greying hitmen - and let's face it, wouldn't that be just as good? I mean, who wouldn't want to have one as a favour-granting friend...

Anyway, so far so great. The only problem is that I'm only here because I'm two hours early for a meeting that I endured much stress to make it here on time for. On arrival I was rebuffed by a bunch of people in their late thirties boasting haircuts designed for the early twenties, and almost gatecrashed a fundraser for Comic Relief. I then reaffirmed that my mobile phone is indeed absolute shit, only to have it's status retrospectively elevated by the fact that nearly all the phone boxes in Covent Garden don't acually have phones in - and the one that did, had shit in it as well. Which I trod in. I wonder if I sit here long enough, I'll get a few sympathetic squirts of air freshner - of course, there's no grass for about five miles in any direction to wipe it on. Oh cruel, capricious fate.