Sometimes you just wish they'd include a diagram...

Those fine people down at Aldi tempted me to purchase a so-called digital voice recorder yesterday. In it's tiny frame, it claims to hold as much as 155 hours of speech. According to my calculations, that's more than Mrs Blunt and I have spoken in our almost 40 years of married life.

The so-called 'instructions' included the kind of gibberish normally associated with a Babelfish translation.

ET-880 connect PC from USB, PC shows U disk after 2 seconds ... open to need file that you put it copy the record file of ACT format into your computer ... Converted WAV file that the player of offering of the operating system or support WAV too

Grappling with how to work the thing proved too much, in the end. I fear it may be destined for a return journey to Aldi, where it will doubtless be purchased by some young techno-geek who understands that kind of language.

I'd rather be a Journalist than an Engineer

In the days when the establishment was easily rocked by the barbed comments of satirists, the late and much lamented Peter Cook was always someone I particularly enjoyed.

As I struggled manfully to assemble a simple shoe cupboard yesterday, I thought of his wonderful monologue by the character he created, EL Wisty. Mr Wisty bemoaned the fact that he would much have preferred to have been a judge than a miner.

I retrieved the assembly instructions from the bin this morning, to demonstrate why I think I was right to choose journalism as my lifetime career, rather than following in the footsteps of my father, who was an engineer.

These wordless instructions led me, first of all, to assemble the two sides the wrong way around. Then, I somehow managed to insert the piece marked with an arrow in the wrong place.

A job that might have taken any competent DIYer little more than 10 minutes managed to take over an hour. Those handles on the cabinet doors started to take on the form of an accusing grin.

They say a picture paints a thousand words. Not in this case, it didn't.