Columns

We freelance back-page columnists are rarely allowed to venture out into polite society. It's generally agreed that we should be kept tethered to kitchen tables and allowed only shabby pyjamas to wear, like the house elves in Harry Potter. It's a little known fact that if Nik Rawlinson were to give me a pair of mittens the enchantment would be broken and I'd be free to run around Soho spilling MacUser's secrets to all medialand. Dangerous.

Sure, on occasion we might be let out to roam the MacUser office and bother the proper journalists, but frankly the excitement of all those people and computers and laminated security passes in one place gets us all hot and bothered, so these tend to be rare occasions. Just look at the little photograph of me that accompanies this page. Look closely. Closer; right into the pupils. I look stark staring mad, as if I've never clapped eyes on a camera before. The lights! The shiny laminate flooring! It's too beautiful! I'm like the elephant man at the opera. A couple of years ago I attended the glittering MacUser awards ceremony and ran into a similarly dazzled Adam Banks. I don't remember much after that, but I've heard from other traumatised partygoers that the universe momentarily imploded in a shower of overdue copy and VAT receipts.

Imagine my surprise then, when I was invited to a proper media event by those techno-wizards at NEC. I checked the invite. I checked it several times, in fact, and checked if they had the correct Jennifer McRobbie. To be fair, there aren't many of us around, but perhaps NEC had intended to invite Angela McRobbie, the noted pop culture commentator and academic? No, they hadn't. They had invited me and a crowd

From the moment we entered NEC's super-intelligent space-age media suite, it became clear that I just wasn't cool enough to be there. While the other journalists adopted their polite yet professional poker faces I became hypnotised by the amazing Bond-style gadget lair. Biometric devices read our fingerprints and secured rooms, and spotted fake explosives with flashy lights and sinister warning messages. Indestructible laptops were tossed around the room like Frisbees. RFID did sinister, Orwellian things I didn't fully understand but marvelled at anyway. It was ruddy brilliant.

The climax of the demonstration was a short film trumpeting NEC's many and admirable achievements in the field of amazing shiny things. From the front row of the plushy mini-cinema it was all highly impressive. Helicopter shots of London zoomed past on huge digital flatscreens. The aspirational soundtrack swirled around us as a booming narrator said reassuring words like 'dynamic' and 'solutions'. If the Government could market, say, Guernsey milk in this way, we'd all have teeth like tombstones and bones of twisted steel.

After the technological fireworks, we were ushered to the corporate box to have our eardrums blown out by Dave Grohl and his estimable Foo Fighters. Again, the jaded blokes in ironic T-shirts proved icy cool in the face of hardcore rocking excellence. As I bopped about in my chair and sat on my hands lest a fit of ill-advised 'clapping along' broke out, they stood and gazed evenly down at the moshpit, like mighty hawks glowering over the savannah. As I write this, incidentally, online news networks are reporting that supermodel strop-maiden Naomi Campbell was mugged in a (different) corporate box at The O2 during a Led Zeppelin gig. I imagine she was less 'mugged' and more 'over-enthusiastically fan-girled' by a cub reporter that simply lost it in the face of such spectacular glamour. Had Jon Bon Jovi turned up in our box, for example, I'm sure I might have reacted in a similarly kleptomaniacal fashion.