For years, I was the only person I knew who would have nothing to do with computers. Then at a meeting of some charity, at which all the volunteers were my age or older, it transpired that I was the only person who had to be contacted by post. I pulled myself together and, for the last ten years or so, the computer has swallowed up my life.

I have spent hours and hours — adding up to days and days — looking up things that I don’t really need to know and, compulsively, answering e-mails (checked many times a day) the moment they arrive.

It took Donald Trump and a week beside a rushing stream to cure me.

When we set off for Wales I wasn’t able to leave the wretched thing behind, because I need it to write anything — even a message for the milkman. I can no longer depress the keys of my old typewriter, or read my own hand-writing; but I did promise myself that I wouldn’t open any e-mails, or look anything up, or even listen to the News.

And I didn’t. The constant quiet roar of the stream replaced the News which had lost all relevance and it was surprisingly easy to not press the mail icon, and not to look up every stray reference in the book I was reading (which was Frances Wheen’s biography of Karl Marx, bulging with possible ‘leads’). What did it matter if the only thing I would ever know about Hegel were these heart-stopping words: ‘The Owl of Minerva spreads its wings only at dusk.’

If the author of a book thinks we need to know something, he will tell us. And if we are completely at sea, we are not the right reader.

Anyway, who needs to know what everyone looks like and where they come from and whether (a quirk of mine) they are Jewish or not . . . ?

Unlike most addictions, this one was easy to break. It only took a few days free of the world-wide web to remind me how very much better life had been before. I had realised, just in time (I turned 82 during that week in Wales) that I had lost two precious childhood skills: I could no longer write legibly but, more important by far, I had forgotten how to get lost in a book.

As for the News. It could wait till we got back to London.