Here I am, sitting at my computer with the cat nearly resident on TOP of the keyboard and purring loudly in my ear. She’s probably better at technical stuff than I am. She certainly thinks she is, as she constantly tries to edit my work with her neat little pussycat paws. Her form of touchtyping is to be avoided at all costs, though. I’ve had beta readers say to me, ‘why is there ‘xk;aig’ in the middle of this paragraph? Did you mean to do that?’ And I have to say, ‘it was the cat’. Maybe she’d like to be mentioned in the credits at the end of the next book? Or have it dedicated to her? She could be hinting.

Unlike her, I can type proper words and sentences, and I do know how to do things like cut and paste, but that’s about as far as my knowledge goes, which at times can be very frustrating. If anything goes wrong (or appears to have gone wrong as I can never tell if it’s a genuine problem or me just being stupid) I am stumped.

Just recently my computer decided that it didn’t want me to be able to open any of my Word documents – which was basically everything I’d ever written. Could I work out why? No, I could not! And neither could the cat. I did try, I promise you. I googled, which is my ‘go to’ whenever there’s a problem. Not that I’m usually any the wiser as even though the answer Google offers is written in English, to me it might as well be in Double Dutch. Quite often I have to google again to find out where the keys it wants me to use are on my keyboard. Not that I’ll be able to remember next time it goes wrong.

Luckily for me, I have that great and useful asset – sons. It’s lovely having children, but in particular it’s lovely to have sons who know about computers. Daughters are great too, but mine know next to nothing about technology – must be in their genes. However, my sons do, and that’s a great relief to me. One of them is a computer coder and he’s the one that’s best at sorting my problems.

Unfortunately, though, he lives in Devon and I’m in Berkshire, so we have to do the fixing at a distance. And he’s dealing with a mother who’s next best thing to an idiot where computers are concerned. She can type, and that’s about it, remember. Poor boy (well, not quite a boy as he’s thirty-four) – he must get very frustrated with me. On the phone, he tells me what to do and half the time I’ve no idea what he’s talking about. He’s very patient, but as I said, idiot on the line.

This time he remotely took control of my computer for me so he could fix it. Hooray! Now he’s done that once, he can do it again (apparently) and hopefully any other problem I have he can sort just like that.

So… hooray for sons. Well, ones that know about computers.