On the first day of the Christmas holidays, I got up from the sofa and announced to my true love that I would be introducing myself to my feminine side and engaging in some spring-cleaning.

Actually, my true love wasn’t there, so I turned to the cat and announced the same thing. Of course, it ignored me completely and proceeded to busy itself with early-morning ablutions and generally prettifying itself for its own true love, a neighbourhood cat. So many true loves on one sofa that it was all looking like a low-budget Mexican soap opera.

Men cannot multitask – however, they’re the best at getting distracted. Which is how, five minutes into my spring-cleaning, I found myself reading the UK Sunday Times. And an engaging read it was, until I realised that the paper was from last January.

For last year’s words belong to last year’s language- T. S. Eliot

That made me think. How come a full year has gone by and yet the news still reads relatively actual? Let’s read the paper again. There’s Julianne Moore, looking – like she’s been looking for the past decade – like she’s not one day older than 40 (don’t bother looking it up – she’s 53).

Other news items announce that female bosses in the UK earn more than their male counterparts, that northern Mali is becoming a tautology for unnamed atrocities, and that poor people are getting more obese. A photo of Prince Harry playing with the military shares half a page with a close shot of Carla Bruni-Sarkozy playing her guitar.

You see? Nothing hints at the fact that the news is one year old.

It’s the technology section that has all the clues. No, not the items announcing that Gary Lineker has returned to Twitter after a self-imposed eight-day break, or that the UK Information Commissioner has proposed to teach schoolchildren Twitter safety. Rather, it’s the new forms of technology which, one year later, already look dated. My tablet, just one year old, cannot run the latest apps while my phone isn’t as connected as I want it to be. Past gadgets seem incapable of solving present pickles while last year’s downloads lag behind.

But that’s technology for you – so intuitive that it has overtaken our expect-ations and anticipates needs we didn’t know we even had.

So what will this year’s technology be like? We can only guess. All we know is that it will be surprising.

techeditor@timesofmalta.com