As I’ve been on holiday this last week – enjoying Newcastle’s winter sunshine, but not the underwhelming performances on the football pitch– I couldn’t possibly comment with any authority on all the recent IT news I haven’t been covering: Websense snapping up another security firm, perhaps, or yet more seasonal research and 2007 prediction press releases.

As you probably know by now, I have mixed feelings about survey-based stories; sometimes they can provide fascinating, no, interesting insights into IT trends, but they can also be full of self-serving, spurious tosh. Well, I have come up with my own IT research – survey size two – which suggests that the internet still has some way to go before it is truly to impact the lives of all citizens, or stakeholders if you like your New Labour bo*****s. When questioned, a staggering 100 percent of respondents said they would be buying a PC or laptop “sometime soon”, and explained they were keen to use the internet to book holidays and keep in touch with relatives via email “because they never call any more”. But, rather irrationally, they said online banking was still too unsafe to do on the internet. Well, there’s no convincing some people.