We went to see Nick Hytner’s National Theatre production of Alan Bennett’s latest play, People. Verdict: enjoyable and amusing, but not as memorable as his best work (for example A Question of Attribution). In it, Bennett works out one of his ongoing obsessions: what’s happened to British society, and Margaret Thatcher’s role in same. His vehicle is a comedy set in a decaying stately home whose decrepit aristocratic owner (played with great panache by Frances de la Tour) is trying to decide whether or not to hand it over to the National Trust. The comic relief is provided by (a) a nauseating fine art auctioneer of the Sothebys/Christies/Bonham/Phillips variety and (b) a group of film-makers who are using the premises as the set for a porn movie, complete with jokes about erections and a Latvian actress who whiles away the time between fornications knitting something warm for her aged grandmother back home. Her pleasant vacuity immediately brought to mind the sexy Swedish secretary hired by Zero Mostel in the original production of Mel Brooks’s The Producers.

The Trust, needless to say, doesn’t come out of it well: it’s mercilessly lampooned as an outfit that saves British ‘heritage’ by sanitising and trivialising it for the delectation of middle-class folks whose capacity for aesthetic (or indeed any other kind of) judgement has been anesthetized by modern consumerism. But it has at least the consolation of being represented by a terrific over-the-top performance by Nicholas le Prevost as its representative on earth. And maybe the moral of the story is that, just as we get the politicians or newspapers that we deserve, we also get the ‘heritage’ we deserve.

I’m an early adopter of gadgets, which means two things: on the one hand I’m poorer than I should be because I fritter cash on experimental gadgets; on the other hand, I have a hard-earned scepticism of the utility of gadgets. And what I’ve found is that few devices have the long-term utility of, say, the Swiss Army knife.

But here’s a gadget that has really justified its existence: a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner. It just swallows paper and converts it into instantly into pdf files. This one (the S510M) is currently swallowing the vast archive of transcripts, notes and other documents which went into the writing of my history of the Internet. In the process the contents of about ten archive boxes of paper are being compressed into a folder on a hard disk (and, needless to say, into several copies of same folder on remote drives).

I got it originally because a colleague lost one of his Moleskine notebooks and realised that it was the one thing he possessed of which he didn’t have a back-up copy. One way of backing up a paper notebook is to feed it to a scanner. But which scanner? It was at that point that we discovered the ScanSnap. It wasn’t cheap, but it has more than justified its price. The one in the photograph has been running since 2009 and it’s one of the best devices I ever bought. The current model is the S1500M.