I am a very bad speller; at school in Gibraltar we had an English teacher who we, cruelly as it described a physical feature, called Popeye. He used to give us spelling homework and a strap (something like the barbers strop) on the hand for each mistake. Even this ‘encouragement’ didn’t help me learn to spell properly.

As soon as I was able I installed a Spell Checker ROM on my old BBC to help the appearance of my letters and thanked Microsoft profusely when they incorporated one in their Office applications.

My browser experience on Facebook and other sites where we write a paragraph or two consisted of writing the text in OneNote or Word then copying and pasting it into the browser text box.

No longer: Microsoft have incorporated a Spell Checker into the Windows 8 platform. At first I thought this was just in the new Internet Explorer 10 but it is also active in IE9. This one goes into the ‘Good’ column.