Rose-tinted spectacles are all well and good but Come. On.

I don’t know who among you have read Douglas Adam’s brilliant Dirk Gently series (which, although quite fantastic, has never quite achieved the popularity of the Hitchhiker books) but there’s a recurring joke in there where our protagonist Dirk attempts to use an I-Ching computer to solve his problems. The computer’s answer, regardless of the question it is asked, is “a suffusion of yellow”.

It’s quite a charming idea. It is not, however, nearly so charming when it is happening in real life and the answer is a suffusion of magenta. Because, for reasons unknown, my computer screen is currently pink. Very, very pink. It is the kind of pink that looks like I have just popped a piece of cellophane over a lamp or makes me think that I constantly have a bit of sleep in my eye. And although I have dutifully poked the cords under my desk and rubbed my eyes raw it is not getting any better.

Not only is this making my eyes go all weird but I am starting to fear it is affecting everything I write with a pink hue, much like the way a bad headache infuses all my writing with vaguely grumpy overtones. What kind of result this pink hue will have on the kind of hard-hitting topics I’m covering over here is anyone’s guess but I am begging the IT department: please don’t let me find out.