Wouldn’t life be better without the tyranny of computers!

As a cyber attack cripples the NHS and — shock, horror — doctors are forced to use pen and paper . . .

For all the NHS staff and patients caught up in Friday’s global cyber attack — which hit computer systems in at least 99 countries and more or less brought our health service to a standstill — the whole thing must have been frightening.

Most of us are only too familiar with the panic that sets in when our own technology fails. That sinking feeling as the little wheel of death begins to twirl in front of our eyes on the screen, signalling the computer is about to crash.

Multiply that panic countless times as hard drives in busy wards up and down the country were afflicted, and it must have felt like Armageddon. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the poor soul who got stuck inside an MrI scanner as it closed down or one of the many people turned away for X-rays or blood tests.

What makes the whole thing even more scary is the fact that things didn’t turn out much worse had nothing to do with the efficiency of our multi-million-pound governmental cyber-defence systems.

It was only down to the quick thinking of a 22-year-old computer expert who just happened to locate the kill switch embedded in the code of the computer virus that was causing the carnage.

Without the timely intervention of this cyber-knight in shining armour, who knows how far it might have spread.

Put bluntly, we got lucky. And while long term, the attack might turn out to be beneficial for the NHS, since the Government and trusts will be forced to take upgrading their computer systems seriously, the truth is no system, however state of the art, can be made 100 per cent invulnerable to a cyber attack.

The hackers will always find a way in. And next time our heroic young cyberknight may not be online.

What this attack proves is just how absurdly over-reliant we have become on technology. How defenceless we really are. How tasks that we used to quite happily manage without the aid of keyboard or screen have become apparently impossible to execute by hand. And how quickly chaos and panic can spread when those systems go offline.

one of the (unintentionally) funny and most telling moments in the whole saga was when media outlets breathlessly described doctors as ‘resorting to using pen and paper’, as though this was so outlandishly antiquated they might as well have been applying leeches. It was as if the idea of running a hospital without computers was, quite simply, unthinkable.

Which, we now know, it is. But it shouldn’t be. Because it was not so long ago that the country, indeed the world, managed perfectly well without computers.

That was when doctors kept their patients’ details in an actual filing cabinet ( reassuringly resilient to cyber attacks) and receptionists made appointments over the phone and wrote them down in a book.

RADIOLOGIST

held X-rays up to a lightbox and people, professional and otherwise, used their intelligence and intuition to resolve everyday problems, instead of just asking Google.

I am lucky enough to belong to a generation who can still remember what it felt like to live in an analogue world. In fact, luckier still, I have one foot in both. I can compare and contrast.

Though I grew up in a world without mobile phones, email or the internet, I was around when computer systems started changing the workplace in a manner just as radical, if not more so, as the invention of the railways or the industrial revolution in the 19th century.

And you know what, it wasn’t so bad BC ( before computers). Children learned things, instead of looking them up on Wikipedia (which is often wrong). People walked to the pub to meet friends instead of WhatsApping them from the sofa. They played real football instead of the virtual variety. They didn’t lie awake for hours on end, binge-watching TV box sets while eating junk food.

We were leaner, keener, meaner. less snowflakey and somehow more alive. There was no fake news and no one had time to sit around online for hours arguing on Twitter — with someone they’d never met nor were ever likely to — about silly subjects such as transgender toilet facilities or cultural appropriation.

Trolls were creatures who lived under bridges in fairytales, not lurking behind laptops, spewing vitriol. Facebook didn’t spy on your every thought and desire before selling it on to the moneymad internet marketeers.

If you wanted to watch two or more people engaging in adult activities you had to enter a clearly demarcated red light zone from which children were banned, instead of viewing such content unimpeded just as your own 11year-old can.

Young girls weren’t expected to have a thigh gap and people smiled when posing for a photograph instead of adopting a ridiculous pout, like they do now.

Computers had one simple function: to make our lives easier. But instead, they’ve enslaved us. If religion was the opium of the people, technology is its crystal meth. And we are all hooked.

We exercise less, our bodies getting slower and heavier with every new cyber-generation. And we think less, too, or certainly less independently, preferring the group- think of Twitter or Facebook to challenging inquiry.

If you need convincing, let me put it this way: the world before computers brought us Galileo, Michelangelo, The Beatles and a myriad of other cultural wonders.

The internet age has given us Kim Kardashian, a woman who, were it not for the web, would be another nonentity with flabby morals and an even flabbier bottom. You can’t say that’s progress.

It’s time to make a stand. I fight my own little rebellion in small, but nevertheless important acts of analogue resistance.

I keep a paper diary. People — well, my children, mainly — laugh at me for this. ‘Silly mummy,’ they say, ‘ why don’t you use the calendar on your phone . . . it’s so much more efficient.’

I have no doubt it is. But I’ve had far too many computers crash on me to entrust them with the really important things, such as my next hairdressing appointment. Besides, I’ve never heard of a book succumbing to a cyber virus, have you?

But it’s not just that computers crash. dependence on machines that reduce everything to codes and formulae leaves us feeling thoroughly unsatisfied.

Compare the pleasure of putting pen to paper with the frustration of typing the wrong word because of predictive texting. It’s only human to want to take time to order your thoughts, but we let algorithms dictate them because we’re in thrall to technology.

I remember the first time I visited the Cabinet War rooms, Churchill’s headquarters during World War II, and saw the giant maps, the pins denoting troop locations, the log books, the filing cabinets and the vast amount of intelligence, meticulously recorded and analysed.

It seemed extraordinary that in this environment, where the most sophisticated piece of technology was a Bakelite telephone, men and women defeated the might of the German army.

Yet

they did, using little more than bits of string, some drawing pins and elastic bands. Go to dover Castle, from where operation dynamo to rescue ships from dunkirk was masterminded, and you will see the same.

or take a walk through the Science Museum, where the Apollo 10 command module, the forerunner to the Apollo 11 mission that landed on the Moon, shows the primitive conditions in which astronauts were launched into space. They were in little more than a tin can and with less processing power than your average mobile phone. A lot less.

All these achievements relied on one thing alone: the human brain. The technology was part of it, of course; in many cases, it was essential. But it was part of a bigger picture, a human picture.

And yet here we are, just a few decades later, with all that ingenuity lost or in danger of being lost. Because while there is no doubt that when technology works, it works brilliantly, saving time and energy and, no doubt, lots of money.

But when it goes wrong — as we saw last week — it leaves us naked and defenceless.

The analogue revolution starts right here . . .