For those of us who still stare in open-mouthed astonishment at the wonders of the horse-drawn plough, the everyday operations of the latest gadgets never cease to amaze.

Before you'd even registered that the clocks had gone back an hour, as you bumbled and belched, bleary-eyed from your crypt on Sunday morning, a smug little message on the laptop computer nonchalantly popped up and informed you that it had already changed the time on your behalf. It's becoming increasingly hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn't somehow altered, apart from, say, resigned sighing. And there's probably an iPhone app being developed for that as we speak.