I’m actually quite cynical about new technology. I think this stems from being a childhood science fiction fan and old enough to remember when everything new was a lie.

I remember, at primary school, a day of lessons was once put aside so that the whole school could witness the demonstration of a new educational computer device which had recently been purchased at the cost of thousands. It had been on Blue Peter the previous week and almost as much fuss was made as when the Queen Mother drove past our school. The device was called “The Turtle” and it was hailed as “a robot artist” that would teach us maths, computer science and probably art. Naturally I’d seen Blue Peter and so I knew that it wasn’t going to quite live up to my ideal of a robot turtle artist, which would be green and eight foot tall and have a jet pack and lazer eyes with which it could carve statues out of meteorites. However even though I lowered my expectations to what I thought was a realistic level, life still managed to let me down.

The Turtle was a clear plastic dome containing a few bits of circuit board, all mounted on a little car. Through the middle of the dome was placed a big red biro. Using the BBC Micro Computer that the school bought at the same time, an expert could control the Turtle by programming in Basic code and hitting return. It only took about five to ten minutes to get the Turtle to slowly draw a straight line using the biro. I think that with skilled programming it could even do curved lines.

The scars of childhood disappointment run deep. We spent an entire week making little union jack flags to wave as the Queen Mother drove past and the three slick black limos didn’t even slow down; I’ve been staunchly anti-monarchy and suspicious of new technology ever since I was seven.

However the other day I shared a packet of “Lemon Thyme Roast Chicken” crisps with Chris and our friend Zee and astonishingly they tasted exactly like eating a lemony roast chicken. With the slightly pathetic wonderment of savages round a fire, the three of us stopped drinking beer and for a short while just ate crisps, nodding to each other “wow, they, they don’t taste like roast chicken flavour crisps, they really do taste like chicken.”

Of course most meat that’s neither beef or bacon basically tastes like chicken, so perhaps they’ve finally cracked this culinary quiz by making the crisps out of snake or frogs legs or something. That doesn’t matter, what surprises the technological cynic in me is that finally that sixties and seventies sci-fi staple the ‘food pill’ is surely nearly upon us. All they need do now is bring out ‘roast potato’ flavour crisps and you could have an entire Sunday lunch in a crunchy bag. We have wasabi peas – why not lemonandthymechicken peas?

This is just one of an ever growing number of things that are finally getting close to being as good as we used to imagine they would be. Like handheld video-communicators or as they ended up being called “iPhones”, or perhaps most notably the internet. For years gits jumped up and down pointing at the internet and getting excited, even though it was just teletext with tits. But finally it’s changed and is now nearly almost as good as I thought it was going to be before it let me down.

In a mere four months time we breach yet another decade and finally it’ll start sounding right to pronounce the date as twenty-ten rather than two thousand and ten. In honour of this almost entirely meaningless event, which never the less does gently mark our transformation into true citizens of the 21st century, I thought I’d just mention a few of the technologies that Chris and I now use (or plan to use) to make films.