Alright, I admit it. When I saw the Tippex mouse, with its little red nose and beady eye, looking at me in the store, I just couldn't resist. It just looked soooo sweet.

I gave myself all kinds of adult excuses too. I really needed some tippex. It was cute! This looked far more convenient to carry around than a bottle. Oh, and so cute! It would probably be less messy too. Did I mention cute?

The packaging did nothing to dissuade me. It promises that the mouse delivers tippex in a kind of dry tape 4.2mm wide, allowing you to apply just the amount you need to a document, and write over it almost instantly. In the diagrams, when you lift the mouse from the paper, it stops dispensing automatically.

I am now paying for my momentary lapse into the mindset of a three year old, as I have a completely useless plastic mouse sitting on my desk. When I flip the mouse's red 'nose' open and apply it to the paper, half the time nothing comes out. The other half of the time, the mouse delivers ragged bits of tippex tape, a bit like those really annoying fragmented ends you get when trying to use cheap sellotape. I can't get it to apply accurately, meaning that I'm constantly deleting only part of a word. Even worse, after a short while, the tape starts to fall off, so your error is hardly indelibly erased.

In the end, I went out and bought a new bottle of Tippex. It's come a long way since the clumpy, messy liquid we used to write on the desks with at school. It's now a thin, easy to apply, quick drying liquid which is applied with a foam pad. And it really works.

My advice? Ditch the mousiness and hit the bottle.