I am having a conversation on Twitter with someone. How very modern.

They have a book out which I think looks quite entertaining. However, the book is only available as an e-book.

“I don’t have an e-reader,” I tell them.

“That’s all right. You can download the Kindle app for your iPhone and read it on there.”

“Thanks,” I say. “But I don’t have an iPhone either.”

It strikes me that although I pretend to be computer literate – I know what RAM, OS and LOL mean, and I like to look at shiny pictures in Wired magazine – I don’t seem to have the spending power to buy into this brave new world.

When we do get the odd bit of new technology – generally courtesy of Father Christmas – the kids inevitably master it much quicker than me. The other day, the boy was shouting at the television, on which he was playing a computer game online with some other friends.

“They can’t actually hear you, you know,” admonished his mum.

Turns out they could, as it goes. They were all playing the same game from the comfort of their own homes, and via the wonders of the modern world they were speaking to each other through the internet tubes as well.

The mind boggles, but only because my generation have had to learn to cope with the rampaging pace of technology rather than being born into a world where daily advances in household science are the norm.

I remember getting my first computer – a ZX Spectrum with rubber keys. You know how we played games on them, kids? We plugged it into a tape recorder and had to listen to three minutes of static and squealing while a game transferred from a cassette to the hard drive of the computer, which was roughly the same power and memory as the chips they stick in cats’ necks at the vets.

The games themselves, while mind-blowingly futuristic at the time, would probably look like cave etchings to young people today. I had Manic Miner and Jet Set Willy, which both sound like something you’d go and see the doctor about. There was also a text-based adventure game based on The Hobbit, in which you had to type things like PICK UP SWORD AND HIT DWARF, and it would generally tell you it didn’t understand.

Most of us managed to get Spectrums because we told our parents that they would be educational and that in the future everyone would be computer programmers. The extent of most people’s usage of Spectrums in this way was to type 1 PRINT “YOU SMELL” 2 GOTO 1 which would fill the screen with the words “YOU SMELL”. Hilariously.

The future duly arrived and, apart from filling a computer screen with insults, I have completely managed to miss out on becoming a computer programmer or anything else usefully technological. Still, how many kids today can write “boobs” on a pocket calculator, eh?