I think it's called 'Progress'

Up until Saturday I’ve been writing on a computer that dates back to the late Victorian period with a hulking great beige-coloured monitor that took up half my desk. We acquired it about 7 or 8 years ago (roughly about the same time we acquired daughter #3, though not by the same means) from a friend in exchange for a bottle of wine and an Indian takeaway. Over those years I wrote my very first, tentative and badly flawed attempts at opening chapters and far-fetched synopses on it, and from the days when it did have internet connection (via a long cable that used to snake across the floor at our old house and regularly trip up daughter #3 as she took her first tottering steps) it still has stored somewhere in its dusty recesses my first emails with Penny Jordan and the editor at Richmond who read my initial submission. Sadly, it couldn’t quite keep up with the advent of wireless and broadband, and although it sounded like concorde taking off and sometimes refused to switch on, it still functioned as a decent enough word processor. Decent enough for me to have written 8.3 books on anyway, but in the last week I've been getting increasingly worried about it making it to the full 9.

All of which is an elaborate way of trying to justify the fact that I found myself in the apple shop on Saturday handing over my credit card completely on a whim and walking out with a big box containing this...

It's the depth of a slim box of matches, utterly silent, very beautiful and slightly terrifying. Every time I come into my office I get the impression that it's waiting in superior disbelief for me to write something worthy of such sleek perfection on its tiny, brushed steel keyboard. It's very clever. I actually wouldn't be surprised if it summarily deleted entire pages and just sent a terse message saying 'Do better.'

Wish me luck...