As I started to write this article, a message popped on to my computer screen saying that I needed to validate Windows 10, which I had (foolishly it seems) installed after an enticing invitation to do so from Microsoft. Why do I never learn?

Technophobes, now is your cue to cross the page and read the letters about global warming or the condition of our roads.

I followed the instructions to the letter and the validation failed. A message instructed me to contact the supplier of the machine and the Windows 7 on it. Two failed attempts by them to help resulted in the decision that it was a Microsoft problem; they gave me the number that began my fraught and frustrating relationship with Ms Quiet in a distant land talking down a long drainpipe.

She apparently could hear me fine. I, on the other hand, could hear one word in three and whilst her vocabulary was excellent, her accent, combined with her inability to speak slowly contorted her words to my perpetual disadvantage when I was typing things in to her instruction.

Eventually she gained remote control of my computer and then began her two hour session, fiddling with endless arcane settings and strings of numbers punctuated by lengthy and worrying pauses.

At the end of the two hours, after a ten minute absence from the screen, I received the message ‘Colin im going to end this session coz it need advance troubleshooting and we only support for download install and activate’ (sic) and she was gone before I could blink, let alone ask what the problem was.

I only wanted her to support the activation, so why couldn’t she? What advance troubleshooting did I need?

The desktop was mine again and heaven knows what had been changed and left unfinished.

By that time of course I had forgotten what I was originally going to write about, you may be diverted to learn. But as I have introduced the subject I cannot deny that understanding what is being said to you in crucial situations by people whose English is good but heavily accented is a continuing and increasing problem.

I have recently been too embarrassed to ask a doctor, for the fifteenth time in a short conversation, to repeat what he had said and hoped that I had heard sufficient to get the gist.

That can’t be a good idea. But what’s to be done?