A few weeks ago I bought a laptop computer in an attempt to bring a touch of professionalism to my writing (it didn’t work - I’m scribbling this in biro on a crumpled piece of paper - but it was worth a try). Anyway, although the same computer was available considerably cheaper at a faceless megastore on the edge of town, I made the purchase in a small shop near my house, largely because buying anything in a faceless megastore is clearly tantamount to handing your soul to the devil on a silver platter, but also because Sergio, who works in the little shop, is a really nice bloke. In fact, he’s so nice that he insisted on including all kinds of extras in the deal: a proper mouse so I wouldn’t have to do that funny finger-dance thing that people with laptops do, a carrying case to lug the machine around in and, among many other gifts, a pen-drive (I think this is also called a memory stick, but I can’t remember).

After a of couple weeks playing with my new toy, I was able to come to an unequivocal conclusion: pen-drives are a very silly invention indeed. They’re far too small. So small in fact that you can’t write anything on them, so you don’t know what’s on there and even if you did it wouldn’t matter because you can never find it anyway. Floppy discs were much, much more convenient but, as a result of our obsession with wanting everything ever tinier, nobody dares say this for fear of being taken down to the town square and slammed in the stocks to be laughed at for all eternity by groups of recalcitrant youths.

Big is obviously best. Which do you prefer - an LP or a CD? A Rolls Royce or a Nissan Micra? A stately home or a caravan? Peter Crouch or Diego Maradona? I’m convinced, for example, that The Little River Band would have been far more successful if they’d been called The Big River Band; it just sounds better.

In fact, the more you think about it, the more you realize that nothing good ever came of small stuff. Napoleon , Mussolini , Franco and Hitler were all pint-sized little blighters and look at the havoc they wreaked, irreversibly embittered because they weren’t bigger.

Somebody needs to have a quiet word with the bespectacled chaps whose idea of progress and convenience is to make everything incey-wincey: ‘Look here, bespectacled chaps, if you don’t stop making things smaller and smaller I shall be forced to biff you on the chin.’ Sometimes it’s the only language these people understand.

I shall now copy this article onto my new laptop and transfer it for safe-keeping to my pen-drive. If I can find it.