I had to 'employ' a computer consultant last month - my seven and a half year old Grandson I.T. Tailer - I offered him 50p and a glass of orange juice to sort my new Dell out. He seemed to sense my lack of understanding and said that as the work was related to digital images for advertising he would need an extra quid and a bag of cola-fizzes for expenses. I kicked up a fuss but he knew I'd have to give in.

I hate anything computer related, but I needed a picture to use in my advertising and the photographer had sent me this DVD thing with them on. I held it up to the light but I couldn't see anything. It used to be so much more simple - you had a print, or if you were really posh, a transparency that you could post to the magazines and the job was done. Not now.

Plus, the Ad guy wanted them on email. And he said my image must be 300 dee-pee-high - what's that? Grandson said he could tell me but that would be training and not directly related work and he'd need another 50p. I gave it him. He told me. I wished I hadn't bothered.

DPI he says is dots-per-inch. Well that's highly technical I don't think, dots I understand, inches I understand.
Then he asked me how many megabytes I could email.

What's a megabyte? And my emails haven't worked since . . . well, since last time.

His little fingers flashed around and he had his answer - apparently on Broadband I can send ten of them - Megabytes that is. Couldn't help it I had to ask.

He started speaking Croatian - I did catch and recognise the word 'compression' - but cropping and jaypegs and tiffs - he lost me.

His fingers were flashing everywhere, his stare fixed to the monitor and his mouth moving ten to the dozen - until I filled it with Werthers, the soft ones that stick your teeth together.

All done, nice and neat - copied, pasted and in the email - he let me press the send button...

While he was working I had strolled over to my old office display shelf and removed a genuine Edwardian Quill and Silver-Plated ink stand from my collection of things nostalgic and spun it lazily in my fingers staring quietly at it.

"What's that Grandad?"

"Don't you know?" said I "tell you what, if you agree to pop in every morning, before school, and open up my emails for me, I'll show you how this works plus, you can have all the Werthers you can eat without being sick in your Mam's car.
He agreed.

"Well said I, aiming the quill lovingly at the ink-well, "it's the very latest, remote writing device with tortoiseshell docking station, doesn't need electricity, in fact it uses no energy at all - it works a bit like that Wii thing you've got - you just dip it in this liquid fuel, wave it around and it writes down what you want to say. You can use them at school."

His eyes widened and his little fingers started pulsing. "Aww Grandad, can I have one, can I have one?"
"We might be able to work something out . . . I might need my invoices putting on a Word file."