I nearly had a serious accident this afternoon on the escalator of the Liberty Plaza. I had gone there to buy a packet of paper and a ribbon for my computer printer - for the purpose, in fact, of writing this book. I had learnt to use a computer ten years ago, when I was already in my sixties, and now I can't do without it, even to write a simple letter. I once read an article by a British journalist who said he just couldn't write on a computer: his brain needed the feel of a pen between the finger-tips. I wonder what he would think if I told him my brain wouldn't function without the feel of computer keys beneath my fingers. For me now, the pen, and even the typewriter, belong to the Stone age.I bought the paper and the ribbon, and the pretty girl in the shop, as she put them into a plastic bag and handed it to me across the counter, said, "It's heavy, can you carry it?' (Poor old guy, I could see her thinking, as she looked at me commiseratingly.) I smiled and said, "No problem,' as I cradled the parcel in my left arm. But she was right, I could feel it weighing me down as I staggered out of the shop. Not for the first time in the last year or two (when I have felt that once simple routine physical operations had become major tasks), I thought of the line in that poetic passage about old age in the Book of Ecclesiastes: "And the grasshopper shall be a burden.