THE HALF-FROZEN KINDLE

Well, my Kindle has frozen. Right in the middle of The Adventure of the Empty Hearse, the classic Sherlock Holmes caper. Half the page is stuck on the splash-screen.

I'm disproportionately annoyed. By that I mean I'm quietly fuming in the corner. I've had that Kindle for about fifteen months: fifteen months of loving the ability to take a whole library of books on the train, in the garden, at the bus stop, on holiday, wherever. It came with me to Italy, where, in the heat of the Mediterranean sun, I pored through the history of the build-up to World War II in Winston Churchill's The Gathering Storm. Even in Eastbourne I raced through pages of a cheap thriller by the dingy light of a hotel lamp. And The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes has been a constant delight and travelling companion.

I went online. It turns out, quite a few people have had the same problem. One or two were sardonically suggesting that Amazon might have done this on purpose.

I used to suspect this about printers. I went through a phase of buying cheap printers - the kind where the cartridges cost more than the machine. Almost exactly one month after the warranty ran out, the printer would jam, it would lose contact with the computer, or tiny wisps of smoke would seep out of the back of it. In the end I got rather fed up of yanking bits of concertinaed paper from the feed tray. It was all very suspicious.

You can't transfer Amazon books. Neither will they repair the fault (not cost effective). So, like those faulty old Epsons and Hewlett Packards in the loft, it means a replacement - which is... annoying.

One help video featured a kind of hipster guy, looking uncomfortable in a blazer and a t-shirt. His right wrist was a maze of tattoos and he carried the traditional light stubble and single stud earring. It was an eHow video, so I stuck with it.

"I'm here to show you how to fix a broken... or frozen... screen..." he said without smiling. "It's a very common problem."

Cheers for that.

"On the base of your Kindle there's a power button..."

I closed my eyes and shook my head.

"... Press the power button for fifteen seconds."

There was still half a minute left so I hoped maybe there was something further than a buffoon pointing out the obvious.

"If that doesn't work, just let the battery... drain out..."

Who's this video for? Chimps? Chimpanzees who've somehow learned to read but haven't worked out that you can reset an electrical device by turning it OFF AND THEN ON AGAIN?

"Hopefully that should fix it. Thank you for watching, don't forget to..."

I switched it off.

Maybe I'll go back to reading actual books. It's nicer anyway in some ways - the vellum curling beneath your fingers, the smell of the paper and the weight of the spine. Certainly, I've already gone back to reading the Bible that way.

Speaking of which, I probably ought not to get too angry about the half-frozen Amazon Kindle on my bedside table or the unhelpful hipster on YouTube. There's something about not letting anger bubble away inside you until sunset - it doesn't do you any good.

Besides, it's only stuff.

Still, I'd quite like to find out how Holmes escaped the Reichenbach Falls.