Could anyone tell me why most garden tool manufacturers insist on making all their small implements green in colour? Having just dropped a pair of secateurs somewhere in a large area of green grassy weeds, and spent a very long time looking for them in vain, I would have welcomed bright orange or even white. It isn't the first time either and I'll only find them again in autumn when they will have changed colour to a rusty brown. Better still, how about fitting some sort of homing device that bleeps so that idiots like me will be able to locate the tenth pair of secateurs or the fifth trowel we've lost in the past 12 months. Inanimate objects seem to have ganged up against me in the past week or so. Printers always used to say they had some kind of imp working against them when things went wrong. I think I've got the granny's goblin. First it was the toaster, which suddenly decided to re-align itself to having just two settings, beige or burnt. I have no faith in toasters. Like many other household items, toasters work fine the day you bring them back from the shop and unpack them. Then it's downhill all the way. It's the same with vacuum cleaners. One day, super suck power that has the cat worried. The next, a single feather is quite safe in its path. I often wonder if it's some kind of psychological thing in that your brain manages to convince you that the new item is the bees knees and you should stop feeling guilty because you bought something you really don't need. Or is it just that familiarity breeds contempt? I could write a book about the number of toasters I've had which don't come up trumps. I could call it 'The Browning Version', but then again most of them didn't. Then came telephone trouble. Now I'm setting up as a freelancer I've had to buy various communication devices. First, a mobile phone. Easy, you may say, except there are now legions of the things. All I wanted was one that would make and receive calls. I didn't want texting, tones, music, cameras, radios, hair removal kits (joking) or something which I realise I've been wrongly calling a blueberry. Apparently it should be bluetooth. Whatever! As I couldn't face being humiliated in a phone shop I bought one on the internet, with camera but without blueberry. And I had to ask my ten-year-old grandson how to start it up. Then a long search for an internet phone so I can call my daughter for nothing. This is a lovely system except that you realise that you can only call people for nothing if they have the same internet phone system. It was news late coming to me. Rather like a former colleague who didn't realise you couldn't send a fax to someone if they didn't actually have a fax machine. 'Otherwise it just falls out all over the floor,' I said, but they didn't see the joke. The phone was easy to install except it said, 'double click so and so icon on the application' and it didn't have so and so icon. So I did what I usually do on any computer, press any and every button I can find. Which, surprisingly, works most of the time, but don't tell the experts. In this case it did. Then the landline failed. We thought it was the handset so I bought a cordless (please Gordon Brown, can I have a bigger pension?). Miraculously, the instructions were dead right. None of your strange Far Eastern instruction speak, such as my friend had when she bought a fridge which said 'please do not hang the small child from the door of this refrigerator'. I realised why the instructions were word perfect when I read the box, it was manufactured in Holland and we all know the Dutch speak better English than we do. But it transpired it wasn't the old phone at all. So we rang BT who said that yes there was, probably, a fault on the line, but that it might be one of our telephones. And here was the catch. They would send an engineer who would repair a faulty line for nothing but if it wasn't the line we would have to pay £116. 'That's a bit steep,' we said. Well we didn't, but that's the only translation you're going to get. In vain did we protest long-term customership with BT. That left us with few options. Either we played Russian roulette and waited with bated breath to see if the engineer would shoot us with a £116 bill, or we thoroughly checked all the other lines. Or, and I'm not admitting we thought of this at the time, we could jolly well ensure the line was partly to blame by shinning up the nearest telephone pole and using our now lost secateurs to trim the line a bit, or push a nice thin drill bit down the telephone socket. Then, when the line was fixed, we could innocently ask him to check if all the phones were OK too. Well, you could get desperate when dosh is involved. In the end it was a forgotten telephone in an upstairs room and we headed off the engineer at the pass. And now for the good news. Stove is on his way out. He's picked up a few hints that his life expectancy is being threatened because for several weeks the oven, which used to switch itself off in the middle of cooking things like souffles or sponges, has worked perfectly. Even the front burner, which only deigned to light after you eventually leaned over the hob to check nothing was blocking the jets thus getting an instant hair trim, now lights first time. But too little too late. Now he's backed sulkily in the corner, eyeing with undisguised hatred a bright, shiny stainless steel model who's flaunting herself in the hall waiting for the gas fitter to hitch her up. You've heard of cat burglars. Well, here's a twist to the tale, or should that be tail. When the family were away on holiday a week or so ago, I was left in charge of the dog, the two cats and the granddaughter. Not an ideal combination for someone who is now settling quite nicely thank you into her retirement. All required feeding and their comings and goings monitored. Early one morning I awoke to a strange sound. I usually sleep very soundly but it had been raining very heavily so maybe that was what stirred my slumber. I opened the bedroom door and at first couldn't hear anything, but then came a distinct scraping from the front of the house. Now my son-in-law had left a ladder propped up against the roof after repairing the gutter. He hadn't actually attached a note reading 'mother-in- law alone in house' but he might well have done because at 3am my fertile imagination was in overdrive. Looking out of the landing window I could see the ladder trembling slightly. I backed into the bedroom and grabbed the nearest weapon, a portable hair dryer. Just what I was going to do with it if a burglar appeared I didn't know, blow dry him into submission perhaps. The ladder continued to tremble and then, just as I stood poised to open the window and wield my hair accessory, the head of the ginger cat appeared, climbing each rung paw by paw with grim determination. I left him outside for half an hour while I had a reviving cup of tea and a ciggie along with a check in the mirror to see how many more grey hairs I'd accumulated.