I was at a party and Tim had brought his new camera, lovely little thing, Panasonic, £300, he’d taken delivery a few days before. We urged him to get cracking immortalising the event for posterity. “I haven’t used it yet,” Tim admitted, a hunted expression flickering across his face. “I’m frightened of it.”

I knew exactly what he meant. In about 1991, I bought a Sony Discman on the Tottenham Court Road for £230. Took it home, looked at the manual, felt the cold sweat spring out on my forehead, yanked open a drawer, shoved the Discman out of sight.

And there it stayed for the next 15 years, transcribing an inevitable arc from cutting edge to museum piece, at which point I gave it to my son. And when he got an iPod soon after that, we gave the Discman to charity.

So that was money well spent.

As the years pass, my fears increase. I never used to be frightened of the telly, for instance. Frightened of what was on it, yes, not frightened of the actual hardware, the box itself. Now, with the proliferation of remote controls, four at the last count, any of which can over-ride the others depending on variations in mood, season, barometric pressure, etc, the humble telly has become my enemy.

If I am on my own in the house (precisely the circumstances in which I am likely to want to watch TV) it is a lottery, with no one to consult, whether I will be able to get the thing to work. If the children have been on the Wii, or they’ve watched a DVD, or there’s been some chicanery with the Sky planner, I am often simply unable to switch the television on.

I used to get angry about this. Now, I just sigh and seek alternative entertainment. Shouldn’t happen to a man, though, should it? Not in his own front room.

I’m also frightened of the wi-fi router. But then, I think, so are most people. My fear of the landline, however, is probably less common. As mobiles get better, landlines, in my experience, are getting worse. Ours is on the blink more often than not. I also harbour low-level anxiety about various white goods in the kitchen. And the central heating. And really primitive stuff like locks and keys and wastebins.

The less reliant I am on any form of technology, the happier I am. Thus, bicycle apart, I have boiled my personal technological needs down to three essentials: a computer; a mobile; a tape recorder. I still hate and fear them, yet I have had to achieve a rudimentary level of proficiency with these three in order to function.

It hasn’t been easy. When my children get a new piece of kit, they don’t turn to the instruction manual, they power it up and start pressing buttons. I admire their confidence, but I belong to a generation that remembers when, not so long ago in actual time, several geological epochs ago in technological time, if you hit the wrong button the thing would break. Or at the very least cock your life up.

In my early days here at The Times, 1992, 1993, you could hit the wrong bit of the keypad and a day’s work would be gone for ever. Vanished. Disappeared. Lost. Worked all night once writing up an interview with John Motson, 6am, tired, pouf! All gone, 3,000 words of top grade Motty copy, my word, yes. Happened with Chris Evans too. And Rod Stewart.

That experience scarred me. It means that when I come across a system or device that works for me, I grasp it tight and cling on grimly, in the full knowledge that the successors to those systems and devices are far superior, and yet unfamiliar. Whenever they even tweak the existing software here, for instance, I resent the change, battle against it, wish it were otherwise.

On a job not long ago, I was on a train coming back from the North East with a photographer, Peter, and in the course of sorting through my bag I laid my mobile (Nokia, circa 2001) and my tape recorder (Sony, circa 1996) on the table between us. “Wonderful to see,” observed Peter, “how you’ve fully embraced the modern world.”

And yet, the Stone Age phone and the tape recorder fashioned in the primordial soup of the mid-Nineties did their job, namely making phone calls and tape recording voices. I don’t require them to download films or send video clips or discover the price of aluminium. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Trouble is, in the space of a week, they have broken, both of them. The tape started to record people at high speed, so I came back from a job at the Olympics site and Seb Coe sounded like he was on helium. And then the phone packed up. I’ve got new versions of both, but they’re obviously both still in their boxes. I have a peek at them from time to time. They make me feel sick with fear.

*Off on holiday. Continuous rain forecast.

Back in three weeks

robert.crampton@thetimes.co.uk