Yes, it’s one thirty in the morning and yes, I am awake.

There is absolutely no prospect of my going to sleep until I’ve told this story, so I’m going to tell it and then I’m going to cause some other things to happen, things so dreadful that I cannot actually mention them on the interwebs.

Yes, that bad.

Yes, too bad for the interwebs.

Yes. Hush now and pay attention and all will be reveealed. It happened this way…

I was having a meeting.

It was a boring meeting and thankfully it was never going to be a long one. It was about infrastructure, cables, and digging holes in the street. The guy I was meeting came to the house and we talked about all these exciting things. For added value, he brought his youngish son with him. I was given to understand that the child was not in school owing to some sort of medical issue regarding an injured leg.

It is now clear to me that the leg was almost certainly injured in the preparation and commission of some criminal act.

Be that as it may…

I had a fair quantity of electronic swag on the desk, because I’ve been trying to do some clever stuff recently like recording podcasts and learning to use a stylus/tablet combo in my endless quest to avoid RSI. I also had my two e-readers out for a sort of furtive re-comparison; having been snotty about the Kindle for ages, I was actually given one at Christmas and forced to acknowledge that it’s a decent bit of kit, albeit still a “third device”. In the spirit of honesty, I had my Sony Reader out too (which I actually paid for), in case my initial assessment of the Sony was also a bit unkind. All this, of course, delighted the infant, who at the ripe old age of fourteen was apparently something of a gearhead.

“Are you gonna get a new laptop soon?”

No. This one works fine.

“But it’s really old!”

It’s only about three years old, actually.

“That’s REALLY old.”

In fairness, some people do feel that’s old for a laptop. I, however, still have a first gen Apple monochrome upstairs, just in case I ever need a doorstop with a floppy drive and just enough space on the hard disk for a couple of iPhone apps.

So while the father wandered around the kitchen tutting and saying things like “we’ll never get the gaskets” and explaining why my newest attempt to drag Harkaway Towers into the nineteenth century is doomed to failure, I talked to the infant about life, the universe, and everything. Specifically, about ebooks, and the Apple Tablet, and Google Books.

And that is where I made my mistake, because the little monster is a copyright extremist-activist.

Look out, Lord Mandelson. This kid is a filesharing 800lb guerilla (yes, I do mean that). One mention of copyright and the issues surrounding the GBS was enough to send him into a kind of focused volcanic eruption. Apparently, anything which stands in the way of Google must be burned to the ground and sowed with salt. Anything which restricts the freedom of the fourteen year old masses to copy, re-copy, re-mix and distribute anything online for fun and profit is an act of barbarism which must be resisted with martial arts and big, big guns.

At which point, his father came into the room to ask me about quarter inch versus half inch piping, and I, bloody idiot that I am, wandered out into the hall. For six minutes. Leaving. The Hellbrat. With. My. Laptop.

I am an idiot.

In the course of those six minutes, he managed to do the following:

Move my new (unedited) novel to a folder marked ‘squirrel porn’ and hide it in the Utilities folder.

Email my old college with the information that I was dead.

Send a Facebook message to a female friend asking her to come round later and give him/me a “Swedish massage”. And certain other services we shall not go into.

And – and this is the kicker – tweet Jasper Fforde and Waterstones with a request that they bring out a Kindle edition of Jasper’s new book, Shades of Grey. Which at least shows he was listening when we were talking about the differences between e-readers, I suppose.

He also sent a couple of other messages which thankfully don’t matter or didn’t do what he wanted them to.

(I found out all this when my wise and tolerant Facebook friends texted me to let me know my account had been hacked. Thank you, thank you, thank you.)

The upshot of which…

… is that for ten seconds I really thought I was going to commit murder (until I found the book – yes, it’s backed up, but I nearly expired with horror all the same) and then suicide (when I discovered I had to all appearances simultaneously propositioned one old friend and possibly insulted another in public at his own publicity event, and been unpleasant to Waterstone’s into the bargain.)

Sorry, to all concerned.

Most especially to Jasper, and to Glenville, Kate, Andy & Greg at @waterstones. And to a lady whose Facebook headshot is apparently particularly attractive to evil teenaged males.

There will be drinks bought and suchlike. Just say the word.