YOU all love them.

But I’m beginning to hate them.

They are meant to save you time, help you, make your left more pleasant.

So why won’t they work for me?

What am I talking about? I am talking about the machines.

No matter what machine I touch it will either not turn on, break, explode or just sit there doing nothing.

I am beginning to think machines, like animals, ape their masters.

That’s why my set are the couch potato equivalent of the gadget world.

I try, I honestly do.

I have bought top of the range items. They look good, they are critically acclaimed, they cost a lot.

But try getting them to work, that’s another matter.

I like a good vacuum cleaner, who doesn’t? One that sucks, rather than blows.

I have gone through three in a matter of months.

Either the on/off switch fails to work, the hose is all tangled up and won’t uncurl, it stops after five seconds for emptying- I know I don’t live in a show house, but that’s ridiculous- or despite the roar of what sounds like a jet engine it fails to pick up even a crumb off the carpet.

Take my oven. No, please, take my oven. It’s like a French air traffic controller. Sometimes it’s working, sometimes it isn’t.

On some days you can put a jacket potato in there and it’s either shrivelled to a crisp in 10 minutes or looks like it’s got a mild suntan after five hours’ hard cooking.

I like a good tv. I like a big tv. Unfortunately, it’s not a good idea to buy one that means you need to knock down an adjoining wall to get it into your living room.

And once it’s in there, where does it go? The current TV unit would be flattened if I put it on there. So it’s on the floor. Viewing programmes with your head on the carpet is not a great vantage point and gives you a cricked neck, trust me.

And what’s with the magic remote? Mine’s so magic, it’s disappeared and I can’t find it.

The washing machine thinks its job is to make your clothes dirtier than when they went in. Black sludge is definitely ‘the look’ in our house.

And you can turn our radio’s volume control up to 11 on the dial, but you’ll still get the sounds of silence. That’s no music, no talking, nothing.

But the real doozy or the icing on the cake is the home computer.

It has a mind of its own. It can turn itself on, it can turn itself off, you can turn it off and it’s still on, you can turn it on and it won’t start. I think you get the picture. Talk about ghost in the machine.

It likes about 30 minutes’ notice before it does anything.

It has the response time of an elderly, infirm aunt getting out of her comfy chair.

And like the elderly infirm aunt it sometimes forgets what it’s doing in the middle of a task.

It’s the equivalent of going upstairs, forgetting why you went there and coming back down again.

Not the must helpful quality, you must agree, with a piece of equipment designed and set up to multi-task.

In fact, just one task at a time completed would be a real bonus.

But I just get the impression it’s either nodded off, got distracted, or found something more interesting to do.

Again like an elderly infirm aunt.

Someone told me that I should treat machines like plants and talk to them.

Tell them what a good job they’re doing, how lovely they are and how much I appreciate them and they’ll respond.

But, what the heck, I’ve only got one thing to say to them and it’s [deleted......]