Remember when the only decision you had to make about a new light bulb was the wattage? Forty, sixty or a hundred – and that was it. Simpler days. Less expensive days.

In Baker Towers we like lamps, standard lamps, table lamps, desk lamps – zonal lighting, you might call it. The days of the single bulb dangling from a wire in the middle of the ceiling (producing memories for those of us over 50 of that brilliant TV series Callan) are long gone, thank goodness.

But now the industry has taken the opportunity offered by the desire to reduce electricity consumption to create a whole new market populated by a seemingly infinite variety of fittings and bulb shapes.

We have the familiar old-style bayonet, a smaller bayonet, large screw-in and small screw-in, halogen capsules – little blobs of glass with wire sticking out of them that are impossible to handle – and then there’s all the low voltage system push-in style of bulbs.

When a bulb goes, today you have to take the old bulb in to the shop to be sure of identifying its replacement.

We have a whole cupboard dedicated to spare bulbs now as opposed to the corner of a shelf of yesteryear.

What makes it all worse is that we were all led to believe that the industry had cheated us all for years when we had the old filament-style bulbs by declining to manufacture the everlasting bulb that was allegedly possible back then.

There were dark rumours of inventors of everlasting bulbs being paid off by the manufacturers to preserve their lucrative market of limited-life lighting. It is certainly true that all the manufacturers of incandescent bulbs met together as far ago as the 1920s to agree manufacturing tactics.

We were given to believe that these new LED bulbs would last much longer than their fragile predecessors. That was indeed part of the selling point of the change that came in.

But in our domestic experience, if a cat’s tail brushes past a lampshade the bulb inside gives up the ghost instantly.

The replacement of bulbs, it seems to us, is much more frequent than it ever was in the past. And all this is in the context of longevity claims designed to make us accept the evolution of the domestic light bulb into its new energy efficient form.

We should have known better.