Or I’ll have no alternative but to Araldite your top lip to the lower one. Happily, I seem to have a tube handy.”Apparently, today’s children should be “making shapes and creating collages, threading beads, playing hide-and-seek under the washing line”. Do try to make it something other than yet another family epic spanning three generations of evolutionary biologists, as your father and I are quite keen to see you have a stab at magical realism Off you go, shoo. Now, run along, sweetie, and write your first symphony while teaching yourself chess and plotting your fourth novel.

MUM, I AM SO BORED I’M GOING TO KICK YOU IN THE SHIN TO SEE IF THAT’S NOT SO BORING NOPE, IT WAS BORING. BORING, BORING…” How are we now meant to react in this instance? “Well, darling, I know you would like a telly and PS2 and Moschino underpants, but the greatest gift I can give you is this thing called boredom. You’ll thank me for it when you’re older, if you haven’t yawned yourself into a top-quality coma. I mean, what are the parents of the other 48 per cent thinking of? Hey, guys, we live in the First World! Get a grip! Whatever, this all led the editor of Mother & Baby magazine (“Now, everybody, are we all agreed that peppermint creams are the new Rice Krispie cakes?”) to the conclusion that today’s children are “failing to learn the art of imaginative play.” This, in turn, was taken up by many columnists, the general view being that, as one put it, “Boredom is the single greatest gift to a child’s imaginative life.”First off, I would like to point out that whatever you might claim for boredom, it is rarely a gift to a mother’s eardrums or all-round well-being “MUM, I’M BORED MUM, I’M REALLY, REALLY BORED. Or so he tells me.Anyway, to the survey, which basically found that today’s young children are spoilt, tyrannical monsters, with their own CD players, PS2’s, computers and designer clothes.

More, 42 per cent of toddlers now have televisions in their bedrooms That statistic is truly shocking. I would think of going into production with these nappies myself, as I know mothers everywhere would be endlessly grateful, but, alas, as my bank manager is always telling me, I have no financial or business sense whatsoever and don’t even know what an endowment mortgage is, even though I’ve got one. On occasion, it may even be an “up the back, up the neck, round the hairline, back down the front and then in between the toes” job requiring, for an effective clean up, the use of a garden hose set on turbo.
As it happens, I’ve been working on my own prototype, which involves several layers of masking tape – don’t be put off by the “not for delicate surfaces” in the instructions; it works a treat – supplemented by several generous dabs of Araldite Rapid and Cerafix Grabs Like Nails Sealant. So, to the survey by Mother & Baby magazine (I’d like to be editor of that, if only to say, during conference: “Come along now, everybody, let’s have your latest potato printing ideas.