David Cameron is leader of the Conservative party, and we haven’t got any firm policies to speak of, except the old truism ‘communism is bad, and you oughtn’t do any of it’. Gordon Brown is leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister. His new policies are mostly ‘I’ll have whatever David Cameron’s having’. It’s over six months since Tony Blair stepped down as Prime Minister. Gordon Brown is in real opinion Poll difficulty, with the Conservatives at least 13% in the lead in national polling.

Boris Johnson is very likely to be the next Mayor of London, with one poll putting him 12% ahead of Red Ken Livingstone. Two years ago, you’d have had to be on crack to predict that one.

In Northern Ireland, The Rev. Ian Paisley is First Minister. Martin McGuinness is Deputy First Minister. It’s a bit like a recurring nightmare that, unfortunately, is about to get much worse. Paisley is retiring, and Peter Robinson is very likely to succeed him.

In the un-liberated twenty six counties, the Teflon Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern, has ended his political career (probably, but Europe is great at choosing trustworthy leaders) in ignominy, resigning as Uachtarán Fhianna Fáil and An Taoiseach in a speech in front of Government Buildings. Brian Cowen, Finance Minister, is to take over. Speculation that Bertie gave in because he has been repeatedly found to be clearly as bent as a nine-euro note are entirely denied by Fianna Fáilers, and absolutely, one hundred percent true.

Wales has a Labour/Plaid Cymru Assembly Government, which I hope for the sake of the Welsh disproves the aphorism ‘you get the government you deserve’.

Scotland has a minority Scottish Nationalist Party government, which puts Alex Salmond at the top table with Gordon Brown, hopefully giving the Prime Minister an ulcer, or a revised submission under Barnett, whichever is worse.

The EU is just as vapid and nonsensical as ever, proving Nelson was right and that the Germans may be the opposition, but the French are still the enemy. Speaking of which, Germany has Kanzler Angela Merckel (CDU, centre-right) and France has Prèsident Nicolas Sarkozy (PP, centre-right) as their respective head of government and Head of State. He just got married to the stunning Carla Bruni.

Douglas Adams had it that mankind was awfully proud of his greatest achievements: war, nuclear weapons, digital watches etc, and felt these were the proof of mankind’s superiority over other animal kind. Dolphins, said the literary giant, felt that these, too, were evidence of the dolphin erudition. They hadn’t bothered.

The fearful angst of those less gadget-ridden than I around me is truly something to behold. They wonder why there’s a peculiar flashing thing on my keyring, and why I had to get a phone with a keyboard. Some of them even question the need for an iPod, or the rationale behind the massive quantity of my free time spent on mucking about with PCs.

They look at me with the same pity normally reserved by newlyweds with their first litter on the way for a friend recently bereft of his testicles, or the look Hugh Hefner probably has for men he meets married to fat chicks.

The need for people to see inferiority symbolized in the material possessions of others is a matter for another blog, but for now, I want to deal with the need for people to get off my case about the amount of tech I have in my life.

They haven’t worked out that technology is neither cool nor fun if you need it. The technology that used to create the little radioactive batteries for pacemakers was cool if one didn’t have to have one fitted. Seatbelts with explosive tensioning units seem like an unnecessary folly until one sees a man on the other side of the M2 from his car. Airbags are fun, unnecessary technology until one goes off in your face, and the little ram turbine that emerges from the belly of the Boeing 777 looks like a gadget until your engines suffer a burn-out at 34,000 and your flight control systems need power.

I’m not suggesting that my over engineered phone is a life saver, but it certainly is a enabling technology with impressive applications. My iPod allows video rushes from DV cameras to be checked for sequence, plays Bic Runga in my head after a hard day’s appeasement of the boss and teaches me how to play solitaire without an undo button.