Last week I opened Facebook to find the following status update from one of my friends:

“Ilana Drunk with love people with I love. I love m best friends who talk. Farmers weekly f***** hell.”

(And before the pedants start commenting about my over-zealous use of the asterisk, she was so inebriated she’d even managed to misspell the f word.) 

I should explain that Ilana is a writer, and a bloody good writer at that, having had her first novel published by Orion and a second on the way. She’s not normally the type of person who litters Facebook updates with jibberish. But until someone fits a breathaliser to her mobile phone, she will probably continue to make a proper Charlie of herself with booze-laden Facebook updates.

The good people at Google, however, have devised a way of saving Ilana from herself. The company has fitted Gmail with a pair of Mail Goggles. Log in between 10pm and 4am on a Friday and Saturday night, and Gmail will ask you to answer a series of mildly taxing maths questions before granting access to your inbox, in a magnificent bid to prevent you coming home after a night in the pub and asking your ex-girlfriend to run off to Wycombe with you. Or worse. 

The Mail Goggles can be activated on the days and hours of your choosing, and you can even set the difficulty level of the questions, just in case maths isn’t your subject, and Google cruelly assumes you’re smashed when you’re simply innumerate. 

If Nokia could invent such a system for mobile phones, the Saturday morning peek into my Sent Messages folder would be a damned sight less harrowing…