It’s nigh on a miracle that I’m able to write this. Not because I’ve been killed by climate change or been infected with TB by my pet badger but because my laptop has stopped working. “So what?” I hear you grumble. “My washing machine has packed up.”

But why is it that things – notably ones that involve electronics – break spontaneously for no particular reason? Take my laptop. I’ve altered none of its settings and yet, mid-typing, the cursor has developed the habit of randomly flinging itself to another part of the document. This means that, before I cut and pasted it back to here, the end of this paragraph migrated to the beginning of it.

It’s almost as annoying as the sound on my DVD player that now skitters all over the place like an excitable child that won’t swallow its Ritalin. Also, as I type, my mobile has just rung, but I didn’t recognise the ringtone as it has changed itself. Where has the old ringtone gone? Again, I haven’t altered any settings, it’s simply taken it upon itself to change everything. Not only that, but now my printer is playing up and my router has lost the internet. It was here a minute ago but now it’s gone. I’ve looked down the back of the sofa and everything but it’s upped and gone without leaving so much as a Dear Jon e-mail.

Why do my things decide to stop working at the same time? Are they communicating somehow? I don’t mean via Bluetooth, I mean via some sort of central sentient intelligence of which they are all part. I’m convinced my laptop, phone, DVD player and printer are part of the Borg Collective. I’m no Trekkie but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that somewhere in the galaxy right now, plotting against the Federation, are Locutus of Borg, my phone and the Hewlett Packard PSC 750 from my office.

I smell a conspiracy. Once, my Sky+ box stopped working the day before the guarantee ran out, and a man came round. “That’s odd,” he said. “There must be something wrong with it.” “Yes,” I said helpfully. “It’s stopped recording.”

“No,” he replied. “I mean, because they’re designed to stop working after the guarantee has run out, not before, because that way you have to pay a £60 callout charge. To have one that’s broken within the guarantee period is almost unheard of. Like I said, there must be something wrong with it.” I still have no idea whether he was joking.

Think about it, though, it is entirely plausible that manufacturers deliberately program our gadgets to stop working at a set time. For this reason I won’t be getting the new iPhone, because it will break. And when it does, everything that’s built into it will break, too – iPod, phone, PDA, diary, George Foreman grill, nose-hair trimmers etc. So I’d rather keep everything separate, thank you. Plus, I don’t want an enormous compulsory airtime contract stating that in return for an iPhone you must give Steve Jobs your firstborn, who will immediately put it to work down the iMines.

I could go on, but my laptop’s keyboard has now simply stoppe . . . If readers are interested, Jon has offered to finish this column with a pen and personally bring it round to your house.

Jon Holmes presents the BBC Radio 2 show, The Day the Music Died. His most recent book, Status Quo and the Kangaroo, is out now, published by Penguin