Much as people may not believe me, us back-pages Beardies don’t get to see what’s in the rest of the mag until it hits our doormats. Really! It’s not just that we are halfway up a sheep, or Dibnahing about with our fleets of Crewe’s finest old english alloy: the way the mag comes together means that we have to deliver at a point when feedback is just too late, and certainly we can’t do cute things like comment on one another’s current columns, except during those odd periods when Honeyball and I start turning up like Lemmon & Matthau at Really Big Events.

So I’ve been noticing, like the rest of you, that the lining-up between contents in issues is getting more and more accurate. I was gobsmacked to find that the gnomes in the labs had gone Atom crazy, just as I was writing about what Atom is going to do to the marketplace in ‘09. So banish all thoughts of connivance from your minds. I don’t even have a poverty-model Eee to plaaay with…

(Oh, and any home proofreaders who snorted over the “quarter of a gigabyte” quantity on the last page of my column this month: it should say “quarter of a terabyte”).