Said the technophobe to the geek!

Having vaguely de-fogged my windscreen and leaning almost out of my seat to find a clear spot of glass to look through, I gingerly backed out of my drive this morning to be greeted by a news report that motorists are being distracted by the amount of stuff they have on their dashboards. Now, I'm a writer, yes at the moment it's for a woman's car insurance firm, but I pride myself on being "a creative". Thus, my mind went into overdrive and I was reminded of a car I saw only the other day, where the gentleman owner had stuck an array of small plastic smurfs on the arch of the dashboard above his steering wheel.

"Yes," I thought to myself, "that would be distracting."

Now, I'm not blonde, but it did take me a whisper of a moment to realise the reporter was talking about technological motoring gadgets; sat-navs, CD changers, air conditioning and the like. All of which have been proved by an online survey (the height of scientific accuracy) to be distracting to the average driver.

The only thing distracting about the air-conditioning in my Astra is that when you press the solitary on/off switch, nothing much happens at all and you continue sweating buckets in your stifling tin box, with all the windows clamped shut, lest you increase the fuel consumption and endanger the planet.

In all honesty, I am a technophobe. I know it's old-hat to be proud of this, but I'm one of those people who writes on their hands, "Doctor 2pm" in blue biro and then, when asked if I can make a lunch meeting, says, "I'll just consult my palm pilot."

I realised recently that I rely an awful lot on the back of my hand. I have good nails, not painted, but long, strong and all natural, and I often look at my hands, bedecked with pretty silver rings and see a patch of fuzzy blue that once said, "toilet roll, milk, sellotape" and think to myself, "just what does this say about me?" I'm sure my bosses have noticed, but I'm hoping I can get away with it because I'm "a creative".

And where others tell of the marvels of the sat-nav in their Audi, I say, "My son's a great map-reader". In fact, I wouldn't go anywhere without him, literally. When my partner and I are off somewhere fairly familiar and one or other of us is map reading, it's my eagle-eyed son who pipes up from the back, "Shouldn't we have gone left back there?"

My son is great with technology and we're already worried about what we'll do when he leaves home, to go to uni, in a few short years. At the moment, if we buy a piece of flat-packed furniture, we just give it to him, go and order a pizza, and by the time dinner is delivered, we have a wardrobe, or a computer station, or a light aircraft. We have already made a bargain with him that when he comes home from uni at weekends, I'll do his washing, if he'll do the DIY. He's up for it; not a technophobe at all.

Even my youngest regularly shows me up at the said computer station. The other day, having got my son to install PowerPoint, I cobbled together a title page, five photos labelled Me, You, Us, etc, added a whoosh sound to each of them and felt immensely proud of myself when I finally got it to run unaided after 25 minutes of futile button pressing. And she calmly announces, "Oh yes, I did my homework, mum," and produces a flash-stick with the most wonderfully animated and colourful exposition of the water-cycle; a seven minute presentation with charts and graphics and a flourish of applause at the end, for goodness' sake. She's just turned 10!

Well, as a technophobe, at least I can say there's nothing distracting in my car that my woman's car insurance company needs to worry about. We even have a gaping hole where the CD player used to be before it shorted out the electrics and we removed it (OK, my sat-nav removed it. Very useful things, sons).