As the full horror of our impending house move comes into view, with the first cardboard boxes insinuating themselves into the house for some advance packing, Mrs Crawf and I have been seeking solace in new IT equipment.

Thus Mrs C has made a quantum leap from her lumpy Tesco pay-as-you-go primitive mobile telephone to a shiny new HTC device.

There must be people out there who have qualms about outsourcing their life to Google. Fine. Be losers. 

All I can say is that when you slide the Sim card into your new HTC telephone, press the On button and then sign in to your Google account, it is startling to see your Contacts, Calendar and E-mail information all downloaded on to this device in a few seconds.

Oh, and it gives you the latest weather for your neighbourhood as well. Magnificent.

Brand of the Year? Yes, and richly deserved if our experience this afternoon is anything to go by.

However, all that is as nothing compared to my new iPad.

One of our group travelling to Vancouver had one, compelling me to gnash my teeth in jealousy for long hours as he watched different movies and generally amused himself to good effect high above the Hudson Bay. So I bought one too.

There is one important drawback. To carry it around everywhere requires some sort of sissy shoulder bag or something similar, and I’m not ready for that.

But otherwise it is an extraordinary piece of kit. Razor sharp graphics (of course). Twitter becomes a completely different experience. A Paint app delivers wonderful, complex coloured pictures. I have found a "Mind-Mapping" app which already has been a real help in pulling together a new presentation. The Apple Keynote app allows you to import, edit and export Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

Phew.

The most scary aspect of this new gizmo is the Amazon Kindle facility, which can be downloaded for free on to the iPad.

Amazon are doing a fine job both by driving down the cost of e-books and making the customer experience fast and smooth. Sit in your living room cruising on your iPad and find a book you like? Swooosh. It’s there on your device, ready to read, with text notes made by other readers if you want them.

Oh, and you’ve paid for it. Did you notice?

Having bought hundreds of thousands of books in the past 40 years or so, what do I do now? Start slowly migrating my lumbering collection into electronic format? Only use my iPad for new books which I have not bought before? What will happen in a few years time when the iPad itself looks naff and dated?

A similar problem presents itself with movies. It was laborious but straightforward to add my CD collection to my iPod. Apple are not going to make it easy for me to add my DVD collection to my iPad, even though the iTunes movie collection seems to have almost none of the films I really want to watch.

I have looked on the Internet for programs which convert DVDs into iPad format without creating a mess. They exist, but do not look easy. Has any reader tried one of these with success?

I suppose that considerations like this are merely a transitional dilemma for Oldies like us, as the world moves away from owning specific items such as pieces of music or films or books and instead "rents" them from the Cloud instantaneously as and when necessary.

Publishers of data (such as books) need to get used to the idea of amassing s stream of small bits of money from many people by offering them a service, rather than relying on larger one-off chunks of money from a very few people by selling them a thing.

In the meantime they’ll no doubt greedily try to get us to buy PD James and Inspector Morse several times. 

Bastards. I am resisting.

Almost. 

Behold the Crawfs trying to move house. Great piles of cassette tapes, DVDs, books, video tapes as well as formidably heavy boxes of LP records. Where should they go? No one wants them. The whole lot would fit in digital format on a couple of iPads and hard drives.

See the price of DVDs tumbling as this new Cloudy world order emerges. Try this classic for a negligible £4.49: 

Maybe in a few years the Lightness of Being will become quite Bearable after all.