On the coldest day of the year my central heating decided it was a splendid day to go on strike and leave me wandering round with goose pimples.

I phoned the company at the stroke of office opening and was lucky enough to get an appointment for the next day (by which time the house was giving a good imitation of an igloo).

When the technician arrived he gazed with awe at my central heating control board and mused, audibly, that he could not understand why it was not taking pride of place in an industrial museum.

It was a nice simple board with little tabs which you pressed down to show when you wanted the heating to come on, the hot water to go off and all sorts of magical tricks like that.

It was utterly visible in all that it did and best of all it was SIMPLE.

The new board was not the same size, thus leaving a small but visible hiatus among my elegant kitchen tiles and, like so many 'improvements' looked a lot more complicated.

Now, readers of this column will recall how wonderfully technically minded I am (forget the computer for the moment if you don't mind).

After all, I can mend a fuse, usually after blowing it in the first place but that's beside the point.

I can wire a plug, remembering to get the wires in the right holes by the colour scheme, and I can change a light bulb all by myself - what more do you want?

But this board was something else again.

It is all-singing, all-dancing, but I haven't the first clue how to change anything so it looks as though I am going to boil all summer unless I can get to grips with the instruction manual or bribe the technician to come and technate.

That was the start of the week of technical misery for me. Like my central heating control panel I had a video recorder which aroused gales of laughter from my posh friends, all of whom seem to change their mobile phones once a month.

It finally gave up fighting the obvious prejudice which faced it whenever I tried to record anything two days in advance and gobbled up one of the few recordings I really wanted to keep.

The new one had fewer knobs and whistles but, boy, were they spiteful.

A friend of mine lent me her son for an evening to programme the beast, for a programme my daughter really wanted to see. He called back the next day with his mother in tow to show her what a clever boy he was - only he wasn't.

Nothing to show for all his efforts.

So then I borrowed his big brother who, patiently, step by weary step, wrote everything down in words of one syllable (reading is one of my more technical achievements) and it finally decided that fighting our combined brain power was useless and gave in.

Whether I shall ever tread those dangerous paths again I don't know, so don't start asking me to record the next edition of Neighbours for you as a refusal sometimes offends as they say in the best public houses.

Finally, and totally in keeping with the general attitude of the inanimate objects in my house, the light bulb in my hall blew. Now that I can fix - once I work out how to put up the steps to reach it!