My nearly 4 year old grandson was here three times last week, and he has developed a taste for computer games. Most of them are really good and educational. They are teaching him all kinds of computer skills as well as number and reading and logic skills.

However, there is one he also likes - not one of the children's educational ones, called Neverball, which has increasing levels of difficulty. It involves rolling a ball on all sorts of curved surfaces, some with barriers, some with edges where you can fall off. You collect coins along the way and work your way towards a target at the end. Max loves it because he just likes balls whizzing around and bouncing off things and he doesn't really care much about his score. But I got hooked into it, and kept on playing after he had left.

I normally stay away from computer games, because there lies madness, but this one had me going for a while. I think I was able to leave it because the repeated falling off the edge into space was uncomfortably like a recurring dream I used to have. Not pleasant. So I think I had a narrow escape from the lost 1000 hours syndrome.