It’s 6.29am and I’m virtually clutching the keyboard in front of me. This keyboard is my friend. It’s white, its purdy and its spacious. For the next seven days, Mrs Shrewsday will be reporting not from this dream machine, but from a tiny iphone screen.

I’ve blogged from the phone before. It is a workable option. I think I might even be able to post pictures with it. But I’m a little perturbed. I don’t want my world to shrink.

If I were lying on a couch somewhere, talking to a very clever man with a German accent trained in therapy, (stereotyping? Moi?) I think he might try to reflect that last sentence back at me.

“You don’t want your world to shrink? Zis keyboard…” imaginary therapist smiles kindly, but adds a professionally slight upward inflection…..”eeees your vorld?”

When Felix was three I had given my all to the children, and I felt a little cramped. I had no space of my own: no study, or snug, to run away and lock the door, if just for a few minutes.

No time either. At the kids’ beck and call 24/7. Phil had to go out and bag the mammoth, and my job was largely the house and family.

It wasn’t a drama and it certainly wasn’t a sob story. I was happy enough. I worked at a haunted mansion, and that necessitated looking sparkly three times a week, and that was nice.

But one day my mother-in-law did a momentous thing. We were at an electrical goods shop, and I was eyeing the PCs. You know, those fabulous Toshibas with vast screens.

And she simply bought me one. Huge outlay: it would have been impossible for me. But it was loaded into the car boot, and soon coming home with me.

And with a flick of a switch and a tiny fragment of a cyberjingle, there it was. My virtual room with a view onto the 21st century.

I might not have a real room, but I did have this: a portal. A cavernous space to fill. All contained in a tiny microchip. I felt a bit like Sigourney Weaver’s Ghostbusters character does when she opens the fridge and meets Zhoul, but in a good way.

There’s a thing called absent presence, according to someone on BBC News yesterday. Sitting in a room at a keyboard, and not really there at all.

That’s me. I joined the great exodus out of the real world, into cyberspace. Not excessively, not addictively, but a little part of every day was spent in MyPlace.

And this went on, a thread through my life. My favourite photos live on Twitter, my garrulous outspokenness found a home on Facebook, and finally my friends found that I kept in touch, after all these years, because e-mail existed. Result.

Until one day, not very long ago, I came upstairs to find my beloved, if rather overstuffed, PC sitting in a pool of tea.

Now I had left the tea there. Tea next to a computer, as my friend, the IT wizard , will tell you, is not a desirable option. I called my daughter who tried half-heartedly to protest she knew nothing about it, and then she came clean. She had been writing a poster urging people to Save The Swifts when the cup of cold, brown liquid had been inadvertently knocked over.

There then ensued a short inward struggle. My door to the world lay there in a pool of tea. A cataclysmic event. But a) it was a genuine accident resulting from no naughtiness whatsoever and b) the whole thing was my fault anyway. Internal demons locked in combat.

And it was ok. I held it together. It’s all right, Mad, I said, you were really honest, well done for telling me. I needed a new one anyway, I said, sitting mentally on the demons as they raged around inside my head.

End of.

I lifted the computer, hoping this situation might be remedied, but as I did, the tea dripped through the keyboard to join the widening pool beneath.

We put it in the airing cupboard, but with no success. This was an ex-computer. Bereft of life, it rested in peace. It had kicked the bucket, shuffled off its cyber-coil, run down the curtain and joined the choir technological.

I had to wait until my birthday for my new one. A Mac, this time, gleaming and white. Now my humble photographs look fabulous too, on its screen, and the desire to post these brought me to WordPress and the page you are reading.

I think it’s time the Mac and I had a break though.

So: I’m off to reach as high as I can , to get the battered green suitcase from the top of the wardrobe. I’ll iron and pack huge swathes of children’s clothes. I’ll remember to pack our toothbrushes, and enough pants for all. And of course the essential iphone charger.

And we’ll drop the dog off at my sister’s, jump in the car and motor down to a stunning little arts and crafts cottage on the South Coast.

See you there.