So said – with scripted sincerity – the small child barely filling a cheap suit predictably accessorised with a clip on tie. Being such a callow youth, the concept of using the time between his soundbites to actually listen, rather than cue up the next cheesy missive had yet to register.

Which goes at least some way to explaining how a spluttered ‘you are fucking joking aren’t you’ spectacularly failed to prevent the launch of the good ship ‘further stupidity‘ into the choppy seas of an irate customer.

“Now Sir, we profile our customer using the PRICES method” [ignore crossed arms and darkening scowl] “That’s P for Prices, R forReliability, I for Image, C for Claptrap, E for Ectoplasm and S for Surely this is some sick joke, yes“. I may not have parsed the entire mnemonic correctly, yet I do remember being asked innocently whether “Image” and “Reliability” were important to me.

Allowed to speak at last, I caustically informed the young pup that as a middle aged man with the dress sense of a blind stoner and a hair line starting somewhere south of my spine, image was something that happened to other people. As for reliability, frankly if I’m handing over a suitcase of cash for some design exercise splattered with ‘my first plastics‘ I’d be pretty fucking irritated if it didn’t start first time every time until I’m long gone.

A frown passed over his youthful countenance as the literally hours of sales training failed to deliver any answer other than calling for the Sales Manager to escort me off the premises. Eventually he sucked hard on his pencil before scrawling ‘Mature Driver‘ on the crib sheet. Which I assume put me in line for some incremental selling involving cardigans, brogues and term time cruise offers.

I entirely disproved his categorisation with a flounce-out refusing to even consider a test drive of something clearly styled by a man with pointy sideburns, a pony tail and a razor blade. Things improved not at all with other brands; the Kia hawker ignored Carol completely on the apparently justifiable grounds that anyone without a penis could have even the slightest influence over the next car purchase.

The Nissan Salesman was some kind of gone-to-seed Rugby player crossed with a failed game show host. I can only but admire his chutzpah attempting to offload a car barely two years newer than the old knacker I was trading in, while demanding the thick end of twelve grand for the privilege. And having dragged the family around most of South Gloucestershire in an attempt to buy something that might transport me to work without bankrupting us all, we ended up back where we started.

At the Skoda garage where a nice man called Steve sympathised with our pleading of poverty while gently explaining that customer financial hardship in no way invoked some kind of hidden discount clause. I’d already told him in no uncertain terms that only snobs and mugs bought new cars and, as a man who had already trodden that idiotic path at least twice before, I was ready for his sales’y wiles.

Mainly by introducing Carol who is brilliantly immune to every sales technique ever devised, responding simply that ‘that’s too much money, come on let’s go back and see the bloke who was BEGGING us to hand over about a fiver for a new car down the road“. Me? Bloody Useless. I just see something shiny and fail to worry about how we might pay for it because I WANT SHINY NOW.

In summary, Carol – adult with good judgement and fiscal sense, Alex – small child with attention span of special needs moth and financial perspective similar to dictator of African country. I did advance an argument that purchasing a new car in the colour we didn’t want infested with toys we didn’t need was such a stupid idea not even I was buying it. Steve countered this offering us a second hand car with none of the toys but in a more pleasing colour for slightly more than the new one he was attempting to shift.

I gave up. Having decided we couldn’t afford the car we liked the best, we ran around for two weeks looking at more sensible options which we really didn’t like at all. There’s a history here; put three things in front of Carol and I and we’ll ignore them all instead selecting a fourth at double the cost of the most expensive. It’s not snobbery, or even good taste (well on my part). It’s just some hard wired issue of choosing expensive things that will cost even more once ownership is ours; exhibit A: this house.

But the kids loved the Yeti. So did we. It’s kind of fun even in the cooking 2WD version* with a not terribly lusty Diesel engine. It’s resembles most closely a Labrador in its desire to please – if such an emotion can be transferred to metal and electronics. There’s some justification in the cost of running the now aged x-trail, the great MPG, the need for the dealer to shift it – but honestly it’s really a shit load of money for something that loses 20% of the value when you drive it off the forecourt.

Once you get over that, it’s fine. Apparently. But otherwise I was going to beat the next salesman to death with his calculator, and I couldn’t ask my family to traipse around soulless car showrooms for any longer.

It’ll be a nice thing to drive a 100 miles a day for the next few months while I wrest this latest project into some kind of shape. And while I’ll be sorry to see the X-Trail go, the next 10,000 miles were going to be significantly more expensive than the last 50,000.

All I can say is it’s a bloody good job that new is – indeed – the new used.

* I wanted a 4WD again until I saw the price. Then I wanted some snow tyres instead

Lots of it out there towards Wales, not much from the pilot’s seat. The return of MouseLung(tm) was not entirely unexpected, but this time shrivelled my oxygenating ability to properly scary lows. Asthma is a chronic disease – you don’t get better – but the management and drugs are so much better now.

Which makes my seasonally unadjusted attack very strange indeed. Always between January and March, a cold will spread to my lungs and for three days trips upstairs have to be carefully planned, with Ventalin lung openers carefully placed in strategic locations. Day four, it’s mostly gone and life returns to acceptable without wheezy lungs and a hacking cough.

This incident progressed as normal; a damp London Monday triggered some shortness of breath, before three days driving all over the country sealed my fate. Good job it’s not infectious otherwise a number of potential customers would be on the sick list.

Friday night though when the worst should be over, things started to get a bit hairy. Firstly the drugs stopped working – normally a hourly puff of Ventalin so opens up the passageways to allow enough air to ‘go lung’. But by 1am I was mainlining the bloody stuff with no obvious effect.

A further joy of an asthma attack is lying down makes it far worse. So I found myself leaning against a handy wall fighting for every breadth and remembering that panicking makes it worse. That happy thought just made me remember to panic really. By 3am, every muscle involved in breathing – and there are a surprising amount – ached, every breadth wheezed like a death rattle, and my entire focus was on dragging sufficient air into shallow lungs.

There’s a further irony with Asthma – at least some of the cause is pollution so the inhalers no longer have any pressurisation to make them greener to make. Meaning there is no propellent to inject the drug into your mouth. You have to suck it in as they say which is quite tough with a peak flow of a poorly mouse.

That was a long night. Followed by a morning of emergency doctor’s appointments, a rush on the local pharmacy and sufficient steroids to stun a small donkey. The improvement was nowhere near enough to place riding bikes in my immediate future, so instead I tramped up a very small hill to throw bits of foam into a bracing wind.

1000 litres of air being blasted into your lungs at 40PSI is probably not on the NHS treatment list but it worked for me. As did rattling down the pills with a Shiraz chaser. Today I’m left with about 75{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} lung capacity and a hacking cough that’d shame a 20-a-day man. It’s not what I’d call recovered, but no longer am I spending evening propped up against a wall wondering where the next breath is coming from.

Without modern drugs and treatment, Asthma is a killer. Without riding bikes and being generally healthy, it’d be debilitating in the extreme. I use it as an excuse when trailing uphills to my fully-lunged pals, but even I don’t really believe that. Except at times like last Friday night. That’d better be it for this year.

Not a new chemical element, although if it were the description would go something like this: “energetic particle not bound to any obvious reference model. Becomes excited when mixed with world. Consumes other heavy elements without increasing mass including chocolate brownies, cheesecakes and waffles the size of decking”

So Jessie is 11. Hard to know what is more worrying – the fact that our youngest child is now double figures and a bit, or that the other one is three months from being a teenager. It’s time to complete the workshop still and raid a food warehouse for a million slices of bacon and one apple*.

A graze through the pantheon of digital archives surfaced these images, which must represent about 1{45ac9c3234d371044e23e276755ef3a4dde8f1068375defba7d385ca3cd4deb2} of the total, most showing Jess pulling funny faces and looking happy with her lot. She even sulks funny.Dusty in my office today, because the random selection of pictures both made my eyes water and brought a lump to my throat.

I cannot understand how that time has passed. New Zealand was four years ago and yet it feels like last year, or the one before at most.

It seems no more than a few days ago, I could pick up both kids and invert them without the serious back injury attempting that with just one would incur today.

They are no less interesting as they grow older. They certainly are lower maintenance, especially if the never-to-be-broken-rule of not crossing their bedroom boundaries is strictly observed. And they both continue to be engaging, funny, loving and generally damn good kids.

It is easy to lament the times past, the loss of their wide eyed innocence and the increasingly distant orbit from your world. Or to fear the onset of boyfriends, disinterest in all things parents and – inevitably – their flight from the nest.

But that’s a stupid way to look at it. The bit we’re in control of is now, so let’s love every day that brings. Last weekend Carol and the kids were away and it wasn’t any fun for me at all. You lose the family rhythm, the pulse of slamming doors and running feet, the set-your-watch-by demands for food, computer use and sugary snacks.

The impromptu hugs, the laugh out loud views of the world, the face-palming stupidity of one family member**, the DVD scrum for which film to watch; all of that and the hundred other little things than sound like nothing but spell family.

So Jess might be a year older, but she’s still my little random. For a while anyway.

* I am on some kind of healthy diet currently. My weight fluctuated nearly 5lbs between going to bed and getting up. Which tells me to weight less, I need to sleep more. Could be onto something big here.

** I think you can guess who that individual is. I like to think of myself as quite a role model.

This was my PCs response to the remarkable conceit that – after 1000 posts and nearly six years – the time has come for a vanity self publishing project. I can sense that my readership (the time-rich, the dribbling, the family members, the hanging-in-there-it-might-be-funny, a small but valued crowd) are almost as excited as I at the prospect of new ways for the Hedgehog to spam his shit*. More on this soon. Obviously. I mean I know I’m interested.

Back when computers were maintained by ex-TV repair men steeped in the secret lore of the Soldering Iron, this sort of thing used to happen all the time. Much to the amusement of the latter day Luddites quipping “Does it need a starting handle” and “Can you get the football on that”. Difficult and dark days for us Pen Protector Brethren. But while we may have lost the battle, we won the war – see those good friends of mine in the vanguard of personal computing? Look at them now. All working in IT. H’mm.

In 2011 tho, that message is bloody stupid. Operating systems and clever hardware gubbins take care of all the old problems. Of course they do, otherwise what we’d be looking at in fifteen years of constant revolution would be a few nice screen drivers covering up loads of shitty hardware. Nobody would buy into that, surely.

Before I lost the keyboard, my will to live had already declared itself mostly expired. Excel handed me a jaunty rotating orb, no autosave and the prospect of recreating the last hours grind.In frustration, I may have gently tapped the keyboard to non-violently show my displeasure. At which point it stopped working. Only not quite, with occasional random key presses illiciting contrary beeps from deep inside the PC case.

The mouse was also partially crippled. Wanging it about in the approved manner generated nothing on screen until – in a sudden rush – mouse poo trails would be etched onto the screen and applications were mysteriously opening and closing. Considering demon possession the culprit, I was on the cusp of an axe based exorcism when a tiny inner voice** wondered if it might not be better to research the problem before the firing up the killfile.

I find this is a known problem. And not just because I know about it and have shouted “the bloody keyboard’s knackered” at a chicken who was largely indifferent to my plight. This makes it absolutely on message with the rest of the family when faced with my mindless ranting. The Internet on the now non broken Mac explained that the wireless keyboard communicated with the receiver using a secure link, and may need resetting.

Sorry? Secure Link? For a keyboard? Who is going to intercept my messages? Frankly if I see that chicken wearing a headset and taking notes, I’ve got far bigger problems than broken technology. Someone in marketing has clearly been involved here “yeah well we can sell it for more cash if we go for the ego-message and tell them they’re all really important so need secure comms”. Dilbert-Esque.

The resolution was to press a combination of keys designed for a man with four hands and a spare nose. I tried it, nada. Then it became apparent additional software was required. Which I couldn’t download as I had no keyboard. So I mailed it from another machine. But Outlook wouldn’t let me open it without a verification code. Which I couldn’t type in. Because – and I think you know what’s coming – I HAD NO SODDING KEYBOARD.

Out of options I went for the nuclear reboot. And you can see what happened. What you can’t see is me motoring off to Ross to borrow a spare keyboard from a friendly sysadmin, and returning with a murderous glint in my eye “you’ve got one chance PC, see that keyboard in my left hand? That’s your chance. See this axe in my right hand? That’s the consequence of playing hardball”It crumbled under the very real threat of hardware evisceration.

Triumphantly logging back into Windows, my analytical and honed mind fashioned a sequence of idiot-proof testing involving pushing of buttons, removal of batteries, scratching of head, flipping of leads and loading of drivers which fixed absolutely nothing. It was then the realisation struck that the last 20 minutes of extreme troubleshooting would have been more effective had I remembered the plug the keyboard receiver back in.

It was so nearly the axe then. But no, after a further year or so of my fading years and more blind alleys than a Microsoft Mobility Presentation*** success was a non flatulent keyboard, a mouse without St. Vitus Dance and barely any noticeable percussive damage to expensive technical items.

The way things are going thought, it’s hard to see how this can be a stable state of affairs. I’ve not put the axe back in the shed yet. But I have sharpened it.

* this is a marketing term. Not a medical condition. I know about marketing now. I’ve read a book. And renamed my home office to “The Evil Marketing Shed“. Everything else you’ve heard about marketing is fluff – all I’m missing are some braces, a breath spray and a personality bypass.

** The infinitely minute bit of Al marked “common sense”

*** I find IT “in jokes” work well to people not involved in IT. To be fair they don’t work that well for the rest of us.

Everything costs more than it used to, right? Basic theory of supply and demand spiked by importing everything except greed, which we’re pretty good at making ourself. Except computers of course which conform toMoore’s law,and are further subsidised by the post-industrial-revolution work-houses of the Far East.

Which goes some way to explaining why every family I know seem to have more complex electronics than people. Quick count here shows 3 Smartphones, this Macbook, my PC, Carol’s PC, kids laptop, Kids PC, Android Tablet, Kindle and a wide assortment of Nintendo stuff hiding under sofa covers. Plus a drawer full of abandoned PDAs and Dumbphones.

But back in the day when sitting in front of a computer screen wasn’t considered a normal way to spend your entire life, things were somewhat different. That fantastic scan from the 1985 Argos Catalogue (thanks Will, top find) showcases the Commodore 64 at a nadge under£200. Inflation link that and ratchet it forward 25 years and you’d be in the market for most of the stuff we have in our house.

So when Mr Olsen (head of DEC-then Compaq then HP, now who the hell knows) confidently predicted that no one would ever need a computer at home back in 1979, he wasn’t being entirely stupid. Because what kind of mentalist would pay£45 for a tape drive when normal people would be using that kind of money to go on holiday.

Ah, exciting times tho. I went all misty eyed on being shown the next picture

I’m not so sure which is my favourite; the microdrive or the attache case. I love the idea of turning up to a meeting, outing the Speccy and then asking to borrow a monitor, plugging it all in, firing it up and then waiting for something to load from the microdrive. And for what? To play Manic Minder? Business is a far poorer place now with the ubiquitous laptop, powerpoint and projector.

There’s much, much more to be found hereand I’d encourage a full cup of tea perusal of it. Last night, I found myself nodding at items staking a placeholder in my life from long, long ago. Including – and this may surprise those of you who have actually met me – a hairdryer.

“The past is a different country, they do different things there” so said LP Hartley back in 1948. I think the bloke was onto something.