We've just converted our house into an adult play zone. The lounge is arranged around some top-notch audio-visual gear and lovingly alphabeticised CD's and DVD's; the kitchen is all black marble and slick chrome; the second bedroom will soon be a gym and the box room is an office. There are no scuffed edges or jammy fingerprints anywhere. None of these uses is wholly new, but the emphasis has changed with our acceptance that we're not likely to have kids.

Having recently spent an unhealthy amount of time alone at home on our pleasant suburban estate, I've come to set my watch by other people's parental duties. The children toddling to school with their designated parents mark the hours as reliably as the cymbal-slapping automata housed in the Trumpton clock. The same parents mark dawn and dusk by dragging the 10-stone curs that had once been such irresistible puppies to the local mud-pit for their twice-daily bowel movements. If I ever lose my marbles completely and retreat to my Fairtrade Synthetic-Ivory Tower, I'm going to make an orrery which incorporates suburban routine into the movements of the spheres.

We're set apart from all of this by not having any chicks to house in our overpriced and under-built starter nest. Were this estate a properly run hatchery, we'd soon find ourselves dismembered, coated in a unique blend of herbs and spices and deep-fried.

Biologically speaking, we're just a pair of broilers. Like the middle-class, almost middle-aged stereotypes we are, our ambitions were at odds with biology. Having spent a large chunk of our adult lives looking for the right career, partner, house, carpet material and eBay rating, we finally fixed on the idea of babies. Mother Nature would rather we'd done our duty at the age of about 15, having failed to notice that these days only disaffected ne'er-do-wells spawn at that kind of age. Evolution is lagging way behind cultural fashion.

Mine is a wholly splenetic argument rooted only in cynicism. While we were dabbling with increasingly futile fertility treatment, my work brought me into daily contact with feckless, drug-addicted, hopeless and uncaring scum who were blessed with more offspring than they knew or cared what to do with. Of course, these individuals had often been doomed by their own parents' antics, but did that entitle them to perpetuate those mistakes like malevolent babushka dolls?

I came to believe that fertility rose in direct proportion to idiocy. While there is certainly an element of self-pity in this assessment, I also feel huge pity for the poor little blighters destined to repeat their parents' appalling lifestyles ad infinitum. Not that the word 'parent' is always used; I shuddered every time I heard that delightful fin-de-siècle coinage, 'baby-farva'.

The right to family life as enshrined in the European Convention of Human Rights is not a notion I can airily accept. Are we really saying that the worst our society has to offer should reproduce freely? That people not fit to own pets should be allowed to create, abuse and corrupt children?

Perhaps there's a thin line between craven moral relativism and eugenics, but I’m still tempted to think we should all be sterilised young and only reactivated if we can pass an exam. However, as the antics of the Nazis and the Norwegian Welfare State system demonstrate, such ideas in practice lead to unspeakable acts of irrational prejudice as long as they're administered by the kind of nasty human specimens who should be their own first candidates.

Not that I’m entitled to feel too superior. If I cared enough, I’d act on my belief that nurture is more important than nature, that children shouldn’t be doomed by accidents of birth, and I’d adopt. The truth is I’m just another messenger for the onward transmission of my DNA, and I’m miserable at a visceral level because I can’t get my message through.

Perhaps I’m just indulging my own resentment because it makes me feel a whole lot better about my DINKY lifestyle. The coffee in the British Airways World Traveller Plus lounge might be bitter, but as long as I bear in mind that I’m not changing nappies or wrangling with teenagers, I shouldn’t be.

(Cont)

The risks weren’t ours alone. So at odds was this venture with our culture of safety first, last and always, where danger only occurs by design, that only true eccentrics could be considered. Despite five generations of genetic tailoring and breeding strictly by licence, not to mention phased social conditioning up to the age of twenty, there were still those who squirmed in their velvet shackles, wouldn’t engage with Consensus and had an appetite for aggression which persisted when the game-pads came off.

By your standards, they were regular guys with a normal set of responses. By ours, they were dangerous if biddable lunatics, lunatics we’d unleashed upon a dozen worlds, possibly including yours. Naturally, they had an enhanced suite of physical enhancements, so I’m sure a great many will have survived anything they came across that didn’t too far exceed design parameters.

They can’t breathe underwater indefinitely, will melt in a lava flow or freeze during an Antarctic night, and would eventually lose the battle with a car crusher. They’ll just laugh at anything else, high velocity rounds included, then indulge in recreational violence until their physical integrity is assured.

Not that I want to cause you undue anxiety. Frankly, it’s a little self-indulgent to tell you this much when we control the flow of information. For all I know, the survivors of the first batch may have settled into lives of quiet contemplation, perhaps even experimenting with such eccentric concepts as marriage, employment or team games. On the other hand, the sudden absence of Consensus may have allowed their super-egos to wither and their ids to flourish. Perhaps we’ve led a technologically enhanced Mr Kurtz into the dark heart of your dimension.

Imagine you were cast adrift in another world with no conceivable connection to your own. Anything you loved or linked with, feared or admired, must be considered forever out of reach; all consigned to a different universe, which in the terms of your new home means non-existent. Your knowledge and capabilities so far outstrip those of your new neighbours that it’s tempting to view them as a slightly lower form of life and therefore unfit to dictate your limits. Before you know it, you’ve coined a new morality and re-invented God in your own image.

Perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll admit I’m rehashing the argument I pitched into Plebiscite when Portal was in the concept stage. Then, my adopted swathe of opinion failed to derail the programme. However, this didn’t stop Portal remembering me fondly when we were proved right, and persuading Consensus that I was a good candidate for the second set of insertions. With a rare flash of drollery, it was christened Operation Coppola.

TBC (maybe)

I wanted to arrive naked, slick and trembling in the moody car park near your flat, but I was talked out of it by Consensus. The handful of your movies I'd seen convinced me that a newcomer to your slice of spacetime should materialise as some sort of overgrown foetus in a phosphorescent womb of raw energy. Only when it was suggested I'd traded my cerebellum for a melon did I concede that it made no sense to pander to the undereducated fictions of a world into which I hoped to slip unnoticed.

I was nevertheless tempted by the offer of a single-use plasma shunt by some prankster. I couldn't decide whether it was a moral spot-test or weasel words from a gamehead keen enough to sneak past Vigilance. A microsecond dose of the fourth and prettiest state of matter would have made my arrival as spectacular as the second coming of whatever you worship, but it would also have turned a city block to molten glass and prevented me from blending in. Not that I'd have found room for it in my suit pockets with all my other tiny essentials. Even if I had, Ethics & Mores would have confiscated it at Portal and Consensus would have slapped me around the lobes.

Such abstract morality: in our pure, rational technocracy, we can't shake off the notion that what goes around comes around, even if it goes around in a different sliver of the multiverse. Not that I would advocate irradiating thousands of strangers on a whim just because they pitch their tents in a different existential campsite. I should grow some manners and explain. I'm from here, but it's a here you're never likely to see. I'm not going to blather on about the prodigious achievements of our civilisation, but it's fair to say we've done much better than you in almost identical conditions.

You have some very quaint cars, boats and aeroplanes, and all of that fossil-burning and getting pummelled by the laws of physics without the benefit of inertial or gravitic damping has a certain old world charm. We have instantaneous travel between dimensions. We occupy the same wedge of spacetime and the same raw matter, but we use a different strand of it; we resonate to different notes.

Or something along those lines. I'm not a specialist and I certainly wouldn't trust me to do Portal's job. But I can just about hold my own in a multiple choice exam on the General Theory of Everything, provided there are lots of pictures in exciting colours. More importantly, I'm sufficiently lacking in fear, imagination and humility to make an ideal test subject.

The Right Stuff, Cojones, True Grit, Affiçion, Derring Do: attach the culturally fitting label of your choice, but this is what the first test subjects had bursting from their flinty eyes. Back then, Portal was 93.7% sure it could deliver them into another dimension with at least 95% physical integrity, but could only guestimate which dimension that was whilst offering a 0% accurate picture of what they could expect to find there.

Assuming they arrived with a full complement of body parts, and not in a lava flow or an episode of ethnic cleansing, they were still guaranteed a one way trip until a way of finding them and bringing them back was pioneered.

TBC (maybe)

Yesterday, a little after my lunchtime pilates session and a little before my afternoon blog, the real world called and I was stupid enough to answer the phone. My boss quite reasonably wanted to know if I'd mind awfully returning to work at some convenient point next month. My mood dropped like a BA Boeing 777 and I found myself embedded in the turf of despondency having failed to reach the runway of healthy perspective.

I've been off work for nearly two months following spinal surgery. As a public sector worker, I'm entitled to up to six months of sickness absence on full pay. However, I used three months' worth following the road accident that smashed up my spine over a year ago. Nevertheless, so good are my employer's welfare provisions that I've become very accustomed to my life of leisure and the prospect of returning to work is both daunting and inconvenient. Once tasted, salaried freedom is an addictive brew.

Mine is scarcely a hard-luck story by the standards of those of you who work in the Victorian hell that is the private sector. Yet I did break a number of bones and have endured a protracted and often agonising process of recovery, so I've hardly swung the lead, certainly not by the standards of the public sector. Yet I must make one shameful confession: I hated work so much that simply not being there struck me as a major boon of debilitating injury.

Not that I'd have chosen the injury, but that line of thought gave me insight into how a chronic malady can become a vocation. I identified with all those jaded soldiers with suspiciously similar bayonet wounds, 'copping a blighty' by acquiring injuries that wouldn't kill or maim them, but would see them on the next boat home.

It's not that I want to do nothing. Naturally, I dabbled with spending the day in my dressing gown in the company of Jeremy Kyle, Frasier Crane and Noel Edmonds (Celebrity Big Brother take note), but their limited charms diminished in direct proportion to my dosage of pain-killers. I certainly enjoy not having to get up in the dark, but I don't sleep with the endless determination of a tree-sloth or a teenager.

During my first long absence, I got through three short OU courses in genetics, cosmology and astronomy. I'd always bemoaned my truncated science education so I took a chance to redress my balance and keep my brain alive. This time round, I’ve discovered blogging and pilates, built up my eBay empire and supervised the refurbishment of our house. While being trapped indoors does sap your sanity and your ability to make small-talk, I relish the absence of chaff.

By chaff, I mean the tedious, soul-draining, futile errata with which the average working day is padded out: small-talk, office politics, dressing-up, dressing-down, mindless bureaucracy, commuting, waiting on hold, waiting for late-comers, waiting for the slow and stupid, being condescended to by the fast and smart, squinting at the crawling hands of the clock with all your telekinetic might.

In cosmic terms, we're less than dust, just inconceivably small flashes of existence in an infinite void, at least according to my positive-thinking coach. Taken together with the ostensibly grim Myth of Sisyphus, this can be encouraging. What we do with our days can have no cosmic significance. It doesn't therefore matter how arbitrary or lunatic we are in deciding what to do with our lives, as long as we're busy and fulfilled.

I might use some of this tortured persiflage in my next job application. Suffice to say, being away from work has given me a new perspective. I want to be busy and engaged, but I resent the fact that going to a place of work usually obliges you to waste half your life on mindless drudgery before you get close to doing a meaningful job of work. I just need to find a way of working from home while keeping all my marbles rolling around in my head: suggestions, job offers and orthopaedic seating welcome.

The whittled-down hag had a name, reflected Kevin as he watched the robotic movements of the gossip dispensers behind the post office counter. He was growing bored and tetchy and knew his features would be contorting into a teenage pout despite the work he’d put into his aloof look. Occasionally pausing for tea and breath, the dispensers unravelled coupons, bills, complex questions of size and weight and the muddled lives of all who appeared before them. Kevin now knew that Sissy was in her eighties, a widow, half-crippled by some bone-wasting disease and working herself to death to look after a son who had some affliction that none dared name.

Not that Kevin had ever asked about Sissy; but there was nothing wrong with his ears apart from the fact that they were five sizes too big for his head. His mum sent him to the post office almost daily and there was always a queue of gossips waiting to pay all their household bills with small change and postal orders. He’d once mumbled into his collar that it might be a good idea to buy more than one book of stamps or pint of milk at a time, but his mum’s hurt silence had been worse than the argument he’d expected.

Sissy was so familiar he’d barely looked at her. She was as much a part of the landscape as the railway sidings or bus shelter that he passed every day. Yet there were always small changes: ‘EGY IS A PEDO,’ proclaimed the wall of the shelter barely a week after the latest municipal sand-blasting.

That morning, clambering on the boulders fractured and heaved aside by Victorian navvies to make a railway that barely outlived them, Kevin had seen her trudging up the pot-holed road that climbed out of the village. Already bored in the second week of the holidays, he’d frozen at the sight of a passing stranger, embarrassed that he’d thought of nothing more adult to do at sixteen years of age than play on the rocks.

Yet she’d remained consumed by her labour. Swaddled in anorak, ankle-length skirt, tights and boots, she defied the July sun. She walked with a drunken rhythm, her left hip dipping with every other step and her jaw and shoulders bunched as if against a gale. A basset hound scuttled panting behind her on the end of a taut lead, belly scraping the ground and neck bulging in front of its collar. With her other hand, she drew a trolley-bag crammed with milk, bread and potatoes, all threatening to escape through a burst zip.

Kevin had winced and slumped into a shady hollow as the words ‘EGY IS A PEDO’ connected themselves to the woman. She was the mother of the weirdo he and his mates had known as ‘Egbert’, ‘Egghead’ or just ‘Eggie’. Years before, he’d been a haunting presence in the village, with his sheer forehead, goggling spectacles, half-mast trousers and disintegrating slippers. Some days he’d stare through the kids to another world so blissful that his smile leaked spit into his patchy stubble. On other days, he’d buy booze and cigs for the older kids and tell the rest about the enemy shock troops he’d killed hand to hand when he worked for the SAS or whatever elite organisation he’d been reading about in the mobile library that week.

Kevin hadn’t known Eggie that well. By the time he was old enough to hang around with the smokers and boozers, the police had been seen at Eggie’s house and he’d stopped coming out. Some of the older girls had been interviewed by soft-spoken police women in t-shirts and jeans about times when Eggie had paid for hugs and kisses with cigs, chocolate and cider.

After a few months of quarantine, the girls had been released to share with their mates the mysteries of the Sexual Offences Act. Eggie had apparently been put on a special register. To some he was a pervert, to others a harmless moron. Kevin’s mum, making a dozen phone calls, had called him “that nonce”.

One summer night, six of them had lingered on the bowling-green, needled by the heat and midges and aglow with cider and the scent of cut grass. James McCluskey’s older brother had been inside for GBH. Nonces were lower than other criminals, who could do what they liked to them. They needed special protection from the screws. Kevin almost asked how much harm a bloodthirsty convict could do with a screw.

His big idea had made Kevin splutter into shrill laughter, which he stifled with a cough when he remembered that everyone else had a deeper laugh. The others had enjoyed the joke too much to notice. ‘Egging Eggie’ had passed for high wit in that circle.

His blood had surged with an excitement that throbbed at his temples and made his palms prickle. Squatting in the bushes outside Eggie’s house, he’d handed out the eggs pilfered from his mum’s fridge, fumbling and dropping the odd one into the dry mulch. The terraced cottage had seemed to exhale decay with its peeling paintwork and luminous smears of moss from fractured guttering.

“He deserves it,” James McCluskey had said, flashing a grin from the shadows.

“Let him who is not a nonce cast the first chucky egg,” Kevin had added, grimacing at a vague memory of Sunday school as the others sputtered laughter like a firing squad.

They’d all leapt into the street and lobbed their eggs. Shell and strands of yolk crawled down the glass and rotting wood. They’d shouted “spas” and “paedo” and “nonce” as they ran. Kevin’s lungs had jolted laughter out of him that didn’t feel like his. He’d seen Sissy; hobbling lop-sided out of the door, gripping the wall, shaking her stick, slipping in the slick of yolk.

“Let us alone, we do you no harm,” she’d screamed, her mill-worker’s accent frozen in time. Behind her, Eggie stood in a dressing gown, spectacles fizzing yellow from the streetlights and jaw churning.
That was the only time Kevin’s mum had ever slapped him, right after he’d pointed out that she’d called Eggie a nonce too. He hadn’t expected to cry for Eggie, nor for the tears to burn like the imprint of her palm. The lecture had lasted a week, with day long pauses for breath. Kevin “shouldn’t earwig”, nor, “take things out of context”. “Taking the law into your own hands,” was worse. His gravest sin had been “judging others”, when nobody knew “what that poor woman had been through.”

Scraping moss with a chewed thumbnail, he watched Sissy dwindle into distance to leave her memory itching behind his eyes. He imagined the braver version of himself he’d like to be. That Kevin would run after Sissy and find just the words to make things right. That Kevin would know what he wanted to do at college and might even have a girlfriend who didn’t find him cute, nice or funny.

Standing, he dusted off his jeans and squared his shoulders. A fresh scar in the rock caught his eye, a love heart bearing the words ‘JAMIE M SHAGD TRACY D’. He laughed like a punctured balloon and felt better about seeing less of his old friends. Even in their shade, he’d begun to sweat.

Lacking any other impulse, he dragged himself up the hill to the cottage he’d walked past a hundred times but hadn’t looked at since the egging. A coat of white emulsion had been daubed onto the door and lower window frame, but the first floor windows were rotting without disguise. The decision had nearly slipped his grasp when he noticed that the door was ajar and a muted cacophony of thrash metal leaking out.

Shuffling forward, he found himself consumed by how much his trainers pinched his feet. The music stopped, then resumed as thumping techno; his pulse matching the new rhythm. As he clenched and raised a fist, the door swung open.

Eggy stood there, looking no older and no younger. His hair was as knotted as a bird’s nest, his beard thickening and speckled with crumbs. He wore only a threadbare football shirt above his boxers. He beamed and nodded.

“Hello,” Kevin stammered. “I’m sorry, I don’t know your name. Do you remember me?”

“Alfred, is someone there?” said a faltering, female voice from within. Eggy’s smile stretched even further and his nodding picked up its tempo.
“Hello,” Kevin said, looking for a deep and forthright voice and finding only a falsetto. He tried to peer around Eggy’s thick chest and belly. “Is that Sissy?”

The front room of the cottage was lit only by the flickering glare of the TV and whatever sunlight penetrated the curtains. His nostrils twitched at the odour; just cooked baked beans mingling with stale sweat, ageing dog and the firework tang of electrics left on for days.

“Clear off,” she shouted. “I’ll have no teenage louts in my house.”

“I’m sorry. I just wanted to talk about….”

“I don’t care what you want. Leave us alone.”

Shadows twisted into human form as she raised her head and spat out her words. She sagged on a sofa, face waxy and shrunken in a mass of clothes, blankets and cushions. Plates, mugs and magazines were stacked on every surface, leaving only a space on the coffee table beside her where half a dozen pill bottles stood back to back like besieged soldiers. Still bobbing and grinning, Eggy pushed the door closed.

The letter took him all afternoon and a dozen attempts:

'Dear Social Services,
I’m sorry to trouble you Sir or Madam but I am bothered about a lady up my road who has a psychiatric son.
I think he has been in trouble with the law but that is years ago now. What I am worried about is that she is not well and very old and shouldn’t have to look after them both.
She has a bad hip and when she is not fetching and carrying and cooking she is lying on the sofa not looking after herself. The house is very dirty and I am not judging when I say that.
I feel very bad that people don’t look after their neighbours as well as they should.
Hoping you can help.
Kevin Anders'

He folded the letter using a ruler, printed the address neatly on the envelope and ensured the first class stamp was flush with the edges. Dropping it into the post-box, he breathed deeply and allowed himself to imagine that he’d set flame to a beacon that would bring official help galloping over the hills. His work done, he retreated into the summer.

The bus shelter was demolished and replaced with an open-sided assembly of plexiglas and steel less suited to skulking and spray-paint. Kevin waited there most mornings for the bus that delivered him to his summer job in the warehouse where he broadened his shoulders and thickened his skin. In what seemed like a heartbeat, he abandoned the kid who’d kicked around the village running empty errands for his mum and fretting about the past. Only from the passenger seat of a friend’s banger did he notice the workmen redecorating Sissy’s cottage. His mum was insistent she hadn’t seen Sissy dragging herself up or down the hill for weeks and couldn’t imagine why he kept asking.

On the last day of the holidays, an empty hearse was labouring up the hill as he walked to the post office for the first time in weeks to pay in his wages. The queue was long enough for him to hear the latest instalment in full. Then he stood for what felt like hours, staring unblinking at an advert for premium bonds and motioning others to move past him.

“I know, I know,” said the cashier to her next customer. “Poor old thing. Some young copper found her on the sofa. Had to put the door in when next door complained about the smell. She’d been there a while. I reckon she had nothing to go on for when they took the son away. Maybe they should have just left them alone.”

As an office worker, I believe all Health & Safety notices should address a number of dangerous fallacies that pepper our idle chit chat:

1. Love is not all you need; it comes a poor 93rd, behind food, water, good books, tea, custard creams, sex (see point 2) and many more.
2. Love and sex are like dancing and music; they can intersect, but are entirely different. Admittedly, it is easier to imagine music without dancing than vice versa, and you should decide for yourself which is which.
3. They are not all bastards; statistically, how could they be?
4. They don't always let you down in the end, unless you're reproaching them for being mortal in which case your standards are impossibly high.
5. You don't need to find the right person; if your needs are basic, almost anyone will do.
6. There isn't someone for everyone, mainly because They haven't learned to clone and pair us yet.
7. You can live without him or her, subject to medical advice.
8. "But I love him/her" is an infantile way of saying your partner should be in Broadmoor and you're horribly trapped.
9. There are plenty more fish in the sea, but many of the appetising varieties have been depleted by industrial trawling, leaving plenty of unappetising or toxic species twitching in your net.
10. We all die alone, philosophically speaking, unless the lyrics of 'Don't Fear The Reaper' are to be believed.
11. You can stand the pain. You haven't had an industrial accident.
12. You will survive. Even if you neither know nor care how to love, I'm sure you'll stay alive, again subject to medical advice.

I'm not sure it would do any good because we're all so in love with love. We think it's something Promethean, a transcendent force that sets us aloft on fluffy swan's wings, like the pretty naked people on those 'Wings of Love' pictures so popular in the 1970's. Yet the snarling cynic in me thinks that most of our courtship rituals better deserve a David Attenborough narrative.

We think of ourselves as highly evolved and self-aware, unlike mere animals with their unthinking and predictable patterns of behaviour. Yet any town-centre on a Friday night suggests otherwise. The alpha-males suck up ten pints of Stella at the watering hole then begin their rutting displays watched by beta-males in CCTV suites. The females suck up twenty Bacardi Breezers then find various ways to shake their tail-feathers and grapple with the ladette dilemma: are they predators or prey? Whatever demographic we belong to, we all obey the same rules. Whether we're trading punches on the High Street or trading witty apercus about particle physics, we're all just fireworks launched by our DNA.

Yet we feel compelled to gild this passion flower. A brave soul of my acquaintance was known at work as the Doctor of Strong Feelings, partly because he was a doctor but mainly because he once admitted he'd never told his partner of ten years that he loved her. He disdained 'love' for the soggy, imprecise catch-all it has become, and preferred to tell her how he felt in honest and meaningful terms. I hope she appreciated his stand, but I never did learn precisely which strong feelings he held.

The word 'love' is certainly abused, and can bear a variety of meanings which are seldom explicit. It can signify sensual enchantment or an attempt to part someone from their pants and good judgement. The speaker may be worshipping someone for all their rapturous, ineffable quiddity, suddenly understanding what all those songs and poems were about. They may equally well be saying it simply because all concerned expect it, making it no more than habit. Love as a vague, unthinking sop to cultural expectation certainly dares to speak its name.
It is wonderful to find someone who can excite, delight and ignite you; who can tolerate your faults without having too many of their own; who can help you exceed yourself. I'm lucky to have managed that, and I would certainly call it love according to guidelines issued by the Doctor of Strong Feelings.

And I’m very pleased with myself for sidestepping all that irrational sentiment, which makes me wonder why I’m ranting on about this at all. My wife thinks it stems from unresolved feelings of bitterness towards my hideous, filth-laden, leprous harpy of an ex-girlfriend. Plainly, I have no strong feelings of any kind about her and prefer to believe that the whole relationship was a fiction.

Baden-Powell would have stormed Parliament with an elite bodyguard of Venture Scouts had this happened in his lifetime. With pluck, ingenuity and skills gleaned from such BP publications as 'Pigsticking or Hoghunting', 'Quick Training For War' and 'Adventuring To Manhood', they'd have confounded all efforts to oust them by police and civil servants, hog-tied as they are by statistical horizon scanning, intelligence protocols and health and safety risk assessments. The skills that pacified the wildest outposts of Empire would have trounced the Gameboy generation, and there'd have been ginger beer, handshakes and no hard feelings afterwards.

In an eloquent fit of zeitgeist, the Scout Association has created a badge for Public Relations. World-shattering as this event is not, it does illustrate a disturbing cultural shift. While having pundits and self-appointed luminaries complain about the next generation's outlook seems to be a historical constant, this is certainly fair fodder for their tabloid columns.

Not that there's anything wrong with Scouting moving with the times. The movement's alumni tend not to end up policing the Hindu Kush or fighting the Beastly Hun these days; they are more likely to work long hours in the service sector, live on convenience food and consider CenterParcs a taste of the outdoors. Hardship can certainly breed resourcefulness, self-discipline and independence, but we should cherish our levels of safety and comfort and not mourn the passing of such great winnowers as Typhoid Mary and Lord Kitchener.

So it’s fair and reasonable that the Scout Association should train the good citizens of the 21st century in a relevant way. But shouldn't that training celebrate the extraordinary? Shouldn't it give kids a glimpse of a world outside centrally-heated homes and office cubicles, so that, if only at weekends, they'll be liberated from silicon slavery?

A glance at their website does offer some hope. Fantastic badges in 'Circus Skills', 'Astronautics' and 'Dragon Boating' are available, suggesting that the space in the average tiny scout hut is well used indeed. My particular favourite was 'Master at Arms', conjuring an image of a bewoggled youth as adept with a double-handed broadsword as with an XBox controller.

Two badges on the list however look like they were on their way to a management seminar when they wandered into the wrong room: Administrator and Public Relations. I can't describe them without reading from a powerpoint presentation in my head. The lucky recipient of these badges will have mastered desktop publishing, corporate press releases and presenting his or her organisation in a positive light by audio and visual media. Short of burning laminated brochures, I can't see any of that staving off hypothermia when the weather closes in on Pen-Y-Ghent. What badges will we see next: 'Cold-calling', 'Performance Development Review' and 'Staying On-Message'?

I could dance around the cliché but here it is: Why can't we let kids be kids? Most Scouts will spend their adult lives tolerating the banal minutiae of working life. Why pollute their childhoods with this nonsense, when it could be given over to adventure and wonder? Any sane person will need adventure and wonder in their hearts to get through employed life with their soul intact. Let’s keep corporate fascism in the workaday world where it belongs.

I am a frightful cycling snob. I scoff at casual cyclists who know no better than to puff along in the wrong gear, bereft of lycra, with soggy tyres and the saddle set too low for efficient leg extension. They neither know nor care about their best times between home and the office, or that some pedestrians and wind-blown KFC wrappers are moving more quickly than they are. They even seem content to queue like saps with the tin-box traffic, never taking to the pavement or jumping a pointless red light, and bouncing along in the gutter when the traffic starts to move. They probably don't even shave their legs, at least not for cycling purposes. Some of them dismount for steep hills.

I don't shave my legs, if only because my calves aren't as exquisite as they once were. In all other respects, I like to think I've earned my cleats. When I started commuting to work by cycle, it wasn't enough to equal the journey time by bus or car. I was finally in control of my commute and wanted to beat the opposition. This meant getting my heart and my sweat glands pumping, which is incompatible with cycling in office clothes unless you like to work alone. So began the lycra revolution. Before I knew it, I'd bought a nice road bike and started clocking up the rural miles, neurotically competing against my own averages and revelling in the speed, freedom and calves like sculpted marble.

Then I lost a big argument with a small hatchback on a fast country road and have spent the last year recovering from a broken back. Even as I flew through the air, I acknowledged that my time had come. I'd had so many near misses with traffic in my cycling life that sooner or later one of them was bound to get me. Cycling in the city, I defended myself aggressively; keeping pace with the traffic, taking as much space as I could to discourage silly overtakes, slapping rear wings to frighten drivers who'd stupidly cut me up, gingerly taking to the pavement when traffic was just too crammed or dangerous to cycle through. On roads with a theoretical 60mph limit, the defensive options are more limited. The fact is that most cyclists have good reason to defend their road-space aggressively.

Cycling etiquette is back in the news following the brutal shopping bag attack by an 84 year old baroness and pedestrian on a defenceless young cyclist. Apparently, he'd piqued her ire by running a red light. Whether he nearly collided with her or not I can't say; but she should be commended for her athleticism.

Legally she was plainly wrong. Sadly, we're not entitled to mete out instant retribution for breaches of the Road Traffic Act. If we were, the roads would soon be jammed with blood-drenched wreckage and police tape. Morally, things are less clear. If the buffoon struck her or nearly did, he deserves the death of a thousand Waitrose prawn & mayo sandwiches. If he was nowhere near hitting her, she really should find something better to be irked by: considering where she works, how hard could that be?

Most cyclists would confess to running red lights. When I'm cycling home from work at 1am and I come to an empty junction on red, I cheerfully ignore the signal. Illegal, certainly; but immoral? It would be lunacy to think this way in a car, which is heavier, faster and easily lethal to others, whereas a cyclist tends only to be lethal to himself.

If I were reported for jumping a red on my bike, I'd have to hold my hands up and take my fine. Many road traffic offences are offences of strict liability. To be guilty of speeding, for example, you only have to be shown to have transgressed the speed limit, regardless of your knowledge or intent, how competent you were, or whether you were the only vehicle on a three lane stretch of motorway on a bright sunny day (not that I'm bitter).

Which brings me to the irksome suggestion that cycles should be registered as cars are so that marauding cyclists may more easily be brought to justice. There are plenty of cyclists out there who deserve to be harassed; scallies bowling pedestrians aside on BMX's, eco-terrorist cycle couriers who would rather crash any number of lights than change gear; sluggards on borrowed mountain bike who just won't get out of the way of faster cycles. We should therefore let PC's and PCSO's harass them using good sense and discretion, in the same way that we used to have traffic cops to harass not just speeders, but the incompetent motorist in all his guises. The fact that the application is lacking doesn't mean the law isn't there.

As a motorist, I am a potential milch cow, liable to faceless sucker-justice if I happen to trip a speed camera, whatever the circumstances. I say sucker-justice because I've registered my car, insure it and pay my road tax; those who do none of these things often have little to fear from automated enforcement. If cycles were registered, wouldn't this principle just be extended wholesale? And how exactly would escalating the cost and bureaucracy of cycling tempt people out of their cars and the cardiac wards and help save the planet?

Surely we should just recognise that grand dowagers may sometimes be entitled to swing a bag at a miscreant, and cyclists may sometimes be entitled to make vulgar gestures at the law.

Diana, apparently, is a whore, at least according to the tabloids. That's going to make her media soubriquet even more cumbersome: Princess of Wales, Princess David, Celebrity, Wife, Mother, Saint, Saviour, Queen of Hearts, English Rose and now Harlot.

She was inconsequential in life and has been dead for more than ten years. Surely the ongoing media fascination with her life and death now amounts to necrophilia, and not just on the part of news editors; the cloth-heads who buy the newspapers and pounded their chests on Pall Mall ten years ago should take their portion of shame.

I may already have antagonised some readers. During that week in 1997, I was bewildered by the strength and sincerity of the grief indulged in by people I'd considered sane. I asked a colleague what the fuss was all about. I acknowledged that the death was very sad, that Diana had seemed a perfectly nice girl and that it was no doubt a life-changing tragedy for those close to her; as opposed to cretins who thought they were close to her because they'd seen her on the telly.

The response was de profundis. With vitriol in her eyes and a catch in her throat, the colleague established that, grandparents aside, I'd never lost anyone close to me, and therefore couldn't possibly understand. Taking my life in my hands, I ventured that unless my colleague had an exotic secret life, she hadn't lost anyone close to her either if we were talking about said Queen of Hearts. This apparently confirmed my irredeemable cold-heartedness.

I couldn't work it out at the time. I remember a roving TV interview with some ordinary bloke waiting for the cortege; he confessed, without a hint of embarrassment, that he'd cried more at Diana's passing than he had at his own mother's. Had we really become so culturally corrupt that we couldn't tell where fiction ended? Had celebrity really become an achievement in its own right?

So she was pretty and took a laudable interest in some worthy issues. Wouldn't that suffice as an epitaph? She might be pitied for her unhappy love life and being the fox to the paparazzi hounds. Then again, she was wealthy and never had to worry about such vulgarities as working for a living. And she certainly learned to use the media to her own ends. We shouldn't forget the vision thing: Diana was pretty, blonde and a master of the dewy-eyed, down-turned glance. Would the famously hard-working Princess Anne have inspired such weeping and gnashing of teeth had she and her retriever died in a horrific Land Rover accident? Would the McCann family have had a different media response had they been less pretty, less blonde and from the wrong side of the tracks?

Then I saw illuminating footage of Winston Churchill's state funeral in 1965. Swinging London stopped whatever mischief it had been making and stood to attention. The old order was being cast off but it deserved respect. Love or hate Churchill and what he stood for, he was undeniably a significant historical figure, a maker of decisions that gave us the world we live in. It was right that the cranes on the Thames dipped in salute because his passing was momentous.

Thirty or so years later, our emotionally incontinent, historically myopic society pulled out all the stops to send a pretty sloane with a vague interest in charity-work into the beyond. Were we really so desperate for something to worship? The cultural ground shift between Churchill and Diana makes us look like a decaying culture well past its prime: a senile dowager who would lavish the same love and wealth on interring a pomaded pekinese as she would once have done on a loved one who mattered.

Perhaps we deserve to be pitied, not punished. So, editors and media whores everywhere, for pity's sake leave Diana alone and bring us some news instead.

It would be as sweet and perfect and still as Ribena in a world without people. But people were always fizzing, like the chalky drink they kept giving him at their idea of bedtime. Or like the idiotic fly orbiting the bare light bulb on his ceiling, dragging his eyes with it in dizzying gyrations. Stopping that wasn’t a stupid thing to do. Better to have broken glass on the floor than all that anger in his ears. If you know where sharp things are, you can avoid them. Noise just filled your head with shards unless you found a way to defeat it. Why couldn’t Mum understand that? He was old enough and he did know better.

Of course his light had been on after bedtime. Without it, he couldn’t lie on his belly with his head projecting into space, seeing in the green and gold squares of his carpet the endless fields and hedgerows of his tranquil kingdom. Nor could he count his collection of cars, parked in good forecourt order between the radiator pipes. The dumper trucks and diggers squatted at the back, ready to deal with any plumbing crisis, with the police cars and ambulances at the front in case they needed to dash to an emergency. All were clean, their enamel free of chips and their decals whole and without scuffs. He could recite each one’s make and model and say whether it was die-cast or pat-pending. There was much peace to be had from this mantra.

The robotic dinosaur, with its blazing eyes and thrashing tail, seemed more alive than ever as it flew from his hand towards the bulb. It had been skulking under his bed, batteries removed and buried deep in the wardrobe, since Uncle Jimmy had given it to him for his ninth birthday weeks ago. The light found itself free from its glass cage and fled into darkness, to be recaptured seconds later when a light switch was flicked on in Mum’s room next door. The plasterboard between them vibrated to a soft but building crescendo of anger.

As his bedroom door opened, he glimpsed the dinosaur lying on its back with jaws agape, ringed by milky shards; a fifty-watt monster newly hatched and denied its first taste of household pest. For a second, both Mum and Uncle Jimmy were silhouettes onto which he could have painted better versions. There would be less grey in Mum’s curls, less sticky black paste in the corners of her eyes, her smiles would be real and just for him and there would be a yellow ring on her finger in place of yellow stains on her fingertips. As for Uncle Jimmy, he would just be erased, reduced to grey smudges and tiny pink strands of rubber, and Dad would be slotted into the space made for him. As they were much the same size, that should be easy.

Mum walked into his room, tried the light switch a few times to no effect, drew a long breath and fixed her gaze on him. In the glistening of her eyes and the faint trembling of her hands, he found a precious new knowledge: he had upset her. The distance between them had telescoped and he could hurt her more if he chose to. Perhaps this gift could also be left under the bed until he found a better use for it.

Uncle Jimmy lingered on the landing, chin pressed into his chest, studying his fingernails and gently swaying to some music only he could hear. Kevin felt a surge of nausea and tasted burning grit at the back of his throat as the image of Dad’s slippers, gently swaying above the staircase, filled his mind. The image blossomed: Dad’s slippers, with Dad’s purple-veined feet still snug inside them, cold and waxen, only the house breathing with a sound like taut leather slapping against wood. It felt so real that it could have happened.

“Kevin!”

The apparition was gone; there was no swinging ghoul, no noose, nothing to mar the new coat of emulsion applied by Uncle Jimmy to the banister. He wondered where he’d put the envelope when he’d taken it from his school blazer.

“Kevin!”

The exclamation jabbed him again. He’d been watching Mum’s mouth move without hearing. He tried to swing his legs onto the carpet but found himself tangled in the duvet.

“Don’t move, Kevin. There’s glass all over. What on earth were you doing?”

“Swatting a fly,” he mumbled into his collar, “a stupid fly. It was buzzing.”

“Well you shouldn’t even have your light on. And you’re old enough to know better.”

He allowed a smirk to curdle his face, raising his eyes to make sure Mum saw it. She dropped her hands into her dressing gown pockets and squared her shoulders, her eyes once more hard and without lustre. Uncle Jimmy had disappeared and a clattering could be heard from the under-stairs cupboard.

“We used to talk to each other, you and me.” He held his mouth shut and felt the silence thicken.

“The specialist said we must talk to each other. Do you remember? If we don’t get things out, they just go nasty and get worse than they were to start with.”

Mum left a space for him to flow into. He found his favourite poster and focussed on the upturned, alien eyes on Spiderman’s mask as he flung himself from the Empire State Building into a space beyond the jostling masses hundreds of feet below.

“So, what is it? You smash things up to get me in here and then you won’t talk to me.”

“I can’t talk to you any more,” he mumbled into his collar.

“What did you say?”

“Excuse me,” Uncle Jimmy whispered as he squeezed past Mum with eyebrows raised and a grin glued to his face. “Don’t mind me, guys,” he added as he stooped to brush up the glass into a dustpan.

“I asked you a question, Kevin.”

“It’s nothing.” He drew the duvet tightly around his shoulders and heard something land with a soft slap on the carpet. Uncle Jimmy’s brushing stopped and he felt the searchlight of Mum’s anger leave his face.

“What’s that, Jim?” she said.

“You’re a dark horse, aren’t you, Kevin.” He was standing, clutching the letter, idiotic grin still in place, like a pools winner with a fake cheque. “Master Kevin Carter, no less, all neatly typed and everything.”

Kevin sprang to his feet, shoulders back and chin cocked high as he’d seen the upper school kids do when they wanted to win a fight without the risk of trading punches. The effect was diminished when the soggy mattress bounced him gently against the wall.

“That’s my personal private property and it’s top secret and sensitive and it’s none of your business so give it back and give it back right now.” His knuckles clenched with embarrassment at the whining note in his voice.

Uncle Jimmy recoiled without fear, hands raised in surrender, eager to leave the stage to the main protagonists; he then hissed and sank backwards onto a beanbag, flushing as he raised a foot to show a white sliver embedded in its sole.

Kevin swallowed his anger, fearing he could no more understand or control it than he could drive Dad’s car or use Uncle Jimmy’s angle grinder. Mum had unfolded the letter and was reading it. He knew it so well, every line, punctuation mark, crossing-out and smudge, that he could track her progress by the movement of her eyes. Even in the weak light trickling in from the landing, he could see the colour drain from her face. She seemed oblivious to the rich and varied swear-words leaking from between Uncle Jimmy’s teeth, and Kevin was less inclined than usual to store them for future use.

She looked up once, scanning Kevin’s face without seeming to notice Uncle Jimmy limping from the room. She then stared at the pages in her hands as if she could will the words to uncouple and re-order themselves into a different and finer truth. At last she sighed, folded the pages precisely, replaced them in the envelope and slid it inside her dressing gown pocket.

“Kevin, I don’t know where to start. He’s got you to punish me, hasn’t he?”

“That’s my personal, private letter.” His eyes prickled and grew wet. “I’m not allowed to blame you. He said so.”

She softened for a second and opened her arms as if to embrace him. Then she checked herself and tucked her hands into her belt.

“Right now, Kevin, you can blame me. Just do one thing for me and stay awake for a bit, ok? Just don’t step on that glass.”

Kevin nodded, pouting and sullen, wanting to ignite his anger but realising he’d just agreed to a ceasefire. Mum left the room and he hunkered down beneath his duvet, hugging his knees and straining to hear what was being said downstairs but catching only the odd stray sibilant. The light from the cordless phone charger on the landing blinked furiously as he tried to form a sentence around the words “son”, “solicitor”, “sabotage” and “this instant”.

Then silence filled the house, marred only by the uneven rhythm of Uncle Jimmy dragging his lacerated foot from kitchen to lounge and back again when the kettle whistled for him.

A car stopped on the driveway and gravel peppered the front door. The engine died with an asthmatic wheeze, the handbrake was ratcheted hard and a door was slammed. Raised voices filled the hallway, an incoherent fugue, his mum and two men. A rustling of paper restored the silence then feet mounted the stairs, leaden and deliberate, to a hissed command from Mum: “Just do it!”

Dad filled his vision again, this time real, alive and bereft of spectral power. Tousled hair, eyes squinting in the half-light, the beginnings of a double chin picked out by a half-grown beard. The letter was crumpled in his hand like a bird snatched from the air and crushed. No noose, dressing gown, slippers or bulging veins; just a paint-spattered tracksuit, last year’s trainers and a tang of stale beer. Kevin felt his heart balloon in his chest and he choked back bile. This wasn’t the Dad who’d left him; this was someone else, someone who should have died as promised.

Dad cleared his throat, opened out the letter and spoke in a headlong rush. He must have been apologising for the lies, for making Kevin think he’d kill himself rather than live without him. Kevin didn’t listen. He brought to mind the words of the letter he’d memorised:

“Dearest Kevin, by the time you read this I may be gone forever cause I cannot live with what they have done and I fear they have put so many things between us that I can’t be the dad I want so hard to be. We were such a happy family at one time and I wanted to work hard and make it all work out but no-one had let me. It’s not anyone’s fault but your mum didn’t want to work at it and she’s got a new man already which is fine but what about you and me, eh. I just need you to know that I’ve tried everything to be a good dad like paying solicitors and such like and not breaking the court order which should not ever have been made anyway. I know he isn’t me but Jimmy will just have to do, does he take you to football? I just want you to think good thoughts about your old dad and how we used to be a lovely little family before all this but I suppose we can’t get it back now what with me gone forever. I know it is not right and fair but I can’t stand it like this no more and I’m going to end my life with a rope round my neck cause it’s the right thing and you are all free then. Don’t you worry, I won’t feel anything. Don’t blame anyone, specially not your mum. Love, Dad.”

As Kevin finished reciting it to himself, Dad finished mouthing his new lies and Kevin was glad he hadn’t heard a word. Dad clutched the letter in both hands and stared at the carpet. There was an impatient snort from the landing. Dad had to say more and then Mum and maybe Uncle Jimmy would be in to talk to him about trust and responsibility and being honest with one another.

Let them come. There would be words and plans and tears. He could nod, sigh, dab his eye and lie. Perhaps there’d be noise, neighbours banging on the wall and another visit from the irritated policemen. Then they’d leave him to think and sleep would be a long time coming, and the next day and countless days after that would be like fever-dreams, stumbled through with disbelieving eyes and a head full of shadows. Kids grow up so quickly these days, he’d heard someone say on the bus. He would choose to believe that, and then one day very soon he’d be rid of them all.

I am (relatively) young, fit, active and, by upbringing, reticent about troubling the state for any kind of boon. I don't smoke, don't drink to excess and hoover up my greens with lip-smacking righteousness. I keep trim and look after my ticker. If I owned a golden retriever and a herring-bone sweater, I could feature on the cover of a knitting pattern. Yet in the last eighteen months, I've cost the taxpayer something like £25,000 in healthcare costs and sick pay. I'm also likely to cost the insurance industry at least this amount. I wouldn't, however, fall foul of Mr Brown's new proposals on NHS reform.

I was a keen cyclist and would often crank out a couple of dozen miles on wind-swept Lincolnshire roads. Then some barely competent and therefore typical motorist, acting as an agent of statistical inevitability, fluffed an overtake and her car tried to eat my back wheel. I was flicked onto her windscreen and bowled spinning into the weeds. The bike's back was broken and so was mine. Once I found that I could move my toes, I was far more upset about the bike.

To cut a long, sore and tedious story short, my spine was repaired with two operations and a quantity of titanium. The bike, I'm sorry to say, didn't make it and was melted into alloy slag after a brief gadget-stripping ceremony. Had I really cared about the environment and the taxpayer, I could have offered the bike to the surgeon as an alloy-donor. So it goes.

I've had a substantial amount of paid time off from my public sector job. The third party insurer has admitted liability and will at some stage be paying me at least £25,000 in compensation. If my injuries affect my long-term employability in my chosen career, this figure could increase exponentially.

If I recover as well as I’d like (I’m bloody-minded enough to do it), I intend to resume cycling. If I cycle for another two or three decades, I’d have to dodge the statistical raindrops not to pick up another high-calibre injury. Even if I forsook cycling and found an outdoor activity with the same aerobic benefits, I’d be injured sooner or later. I don’t want to complicate the debate by mentioning my intrepid forays into skiing, where my inertia substantially exceeded my skill.

So, wouldn’t I have caused everyone much less fuss and expense if I’d devoted myself to a sofa-bound lifetime of vicarious thrills and angina pills? By spending my pennies on cigarettes and alcohol, wouldn’t that have made me more of a giver than a taker in the chancellor’s eyes? If medical practitioners are to risk-assess their patients, should they tut and make warding gestures at rock climbers, rugby players and car-less road users, as well as doughnut-crammers and chain-smokers?

Not that I’m complaining. I’ve done very well out of the NHS and the insurance industry. And because I’ve worked at my fitness where others haven’t, the possibility of cultural triage in healthcare certainly panders to my prejudices. Yet what if one day it is deemed that cost is king? What if using an exercise bike in the living room while wearing a cotton-wool helmet became the only form of recreation not to attract a premium?

A US firm with premises in London recently tried to bar its workers from cycling to work. Regardless of the implications for the employees’ fitness and finances, having them at large on city streets presented too great a risk to the company’s finances to be tolerated. This proves one thing: a logical and statistically sound edict can still be wholly wrong.

Do I want to hate CenterParcs because I've watched too many movies? Does the fiery marriage of proletarian and bourgeois in my forebrain make me balk at the solid middle-class dream enshrined in faux-pine chalets and child-friendly leisure-zones? It is after all Butlins for the demographic more interested in beaujolais nouveau than Cannon & Ball's new show. Or is it simply that the brown-shirted fascists running the place lock you in the car park on Sunday night if you're not sufficiently committed to communal bonding to book Monday off work?

I'm sure I've been conditioned by nearly three decades of cinematic brain-washing. So, like a second-hand Billy Liar, I can't help reaching for the technicolour images that confirm my prejudices. I want CenterParcs to remind me of The Prisoner, but the architecture is too banal, I've never been chased by a bouncing ball (which in any case would contravene the traffic regulations) and I'm just not important enough to deserve such special treatment.

The best parallel I know is Logan's Run. There's a sinister geodesic dome at the heart of a hermetically sealed complex. It takes special skill and determination to escape said complex. Sandmen patrol in pairs pretending to be housekeeping staff. With a youthful gleam and white tennis socks, everyone must participate in the many recreational activities on offer. If you're caught trying to escape, or just being old and grumpy, the sandmen will vaporise you. Only one of these points doesn't quite fit CenterParcs.

Even to the well-disposed, there are more rational niggles. While no more authentically Scandinavian than an Ikea Jogesmaktergerghensdotter table-lamp, the setting of pine-clad villas among whispering trees does offer a soothing degree of detachment from the world. Then again, the cost of renting these breeze-block, self-catering bunkers is high, and the extreme cleaning regime leaves a tang of ammonia reminiscent of badly run retirement homes or cattle sheds.

The cost gets higher if you're so cosseted that you don't want half the adults in your party to share bunk beds equipped with plastic mattresses and a variety of stains, some of which could only have come from decaying corpses or full oil-changes. Such features help to remind guests that they're enjoying an overdressed 1950's holiday camp at 2008 prices.

It would be churlish to deny that I've had some high times there. It's good neutral ground for boozy parties with friends you don't see often enough, and nobody has to worry about such legal niceties as driving home or where you lay your head. If you're bloody-minded enough to get out a board game, it doesn't really matter if it takes longer then one evening. If your social life needs the equivalent of a Camp David Summit, you could do worse. Had CenterParcs hosted Clinton, Barak and Arafat, perhaps the world would be a different place.

Perhaps the real reason I find CenterParcs objectionable is this: It reminds me I'm a socially inept, childless misanthropist who never manages to get Monday off work. After all, nobody likes a calm, pine-scented know-it-all. And I always lose at badminton.

The blinking green button of bliss is never far from my person or my thoughts. Of all the drugs I've tried, from home-brew with a soupcon of mildew to the auto-administered opium attached to my hospital bed, the button is the purest. It can take you up and it can bring you down. It will leave no trace in your blood or urine, though it can leave your eyes bloodshot and your bladder full enough to cut through steel. It is not only legal, it is available off-prescription. You don't need to smoke, inject or swallow it. It can make you a social pariah; not because you'll mug old ladies or contract Hep C, but simply because you'll cease to see the point of leaving the house or talking to anyone other than the postman when he brings you new thrills.

There is a moderately expensive start-up cost, but overall it's cheaper than any other addiction. Most impressively of all, it allows the user to achieve something that has eluded cutting-edge physicists: time travel. I don't want to overstate my case. The button cannot give you a ringside seat at the Battle of Agincourt or allow you to stay in and catch up on some grouting on the night you would have met your horrid ex. But it can magically turn hours into minutes without fail. The user might ask their partner for a nice cup of cha and, supposedly six minutes later, pick up a stone-cold mug of treacle and realise that said partner has been sensibly asleep for at least five hours and the birds outside are greeting the dawn with their usual dumb efficiency.

Of course, the true user will consider the motions of the vulgar universe as nothing set against the power of the button. Let this spinning rock to which we are pinned by enigmatic forces roll around its axis one more time. The universe is old, infinity beckons, and I'm sure if I return to the Cave of Mighty Draughts, I can secure the Brazen Dwarf's Boots of Escaping. Or if that's not to my taste, I'm sure to beat Schumacher's time around Hockenheim on my 93rd attempt now that I'm carrying 1% less front downforce and have scrubbed in the slicks. Otherwise, I'll recharge my depleted neutronium exo-skeleton and disapparate with my plasma rifle. I could stop, but who would save humankind then?

I am, of course, talking about computer games. I've been a gamer since as a thoroughly bookish and socially incompetent teen I played Elite on the BBC Micro and lost hundreds of hours blazing a path between distant stars as a privateer starship captain. I mercifully lost the habit at university, but only for want of suitable hardware. Gaming has never taken over my life, but that's just what an addict would say. Reality in the form of work, marriage and friends has intervened, yet a new exciting game will always provoke a binge response. Having recently taken months off due to a serious back injury, silicon truly became my opiate: while I was immersed in another world, I was deliciously oblivious to pain, worry, hunger and the need to urinate from time to time.

My personal jury is still out on the notion of social gaming. For me, the Xbox’s flagship Halo series, surely the zenith of FPS gaming (all glory to you if this if gibberish), has its best expression as a multi-player game. For my circle of addicts, this has entailed descending on the biggest house available with a console and a TV each, linking the machines with a viper's nest of cabling, then slaughtering each other with strange weapons in exotic landscapes to a soundtrack of drunken laughter, grinding teeth and language that would make Quentin Tarantino blush. While it does bring its participants communal joy, much as bear-baiting or bare-knuckle fighting might, it’s hard to make small-talk about Jessica’s new pony or Tony’s new camper van with a mere blip on the target acquisition radar of life.

Yet the degree of escapism currently afforded to gamers is just a whisper of things to come. Some new consoles offer cinematic beauty in three dimensions. Others offer physical interaction. In not very many years, computers will integrate and refine the two. Within a generation or two of teenagers flocking to arcades to gawp at green dots chasing other green dots across black screens, gamers will be able to choose the heroic or sordid life they wish they had and disappear into it. Will gaming become the new heroin? A new oblivion for the under-employed and disaffected to embrace?

Be afraid; but not very afraid because the uber-geeks will lose what meagre muscle-tone they had.

As a confirmed atheist without children or any possibility of having them, I was surprised to discover a religion that appealed to me. At the risk of sounding like a psychiatrist's dummy, I blame my mum. She's discovered a passion for genealogy and has excavated, dusted off and illuminated the lives of our forebears. I feel vaguely ashamed that despite my willingness to read up on the monstrous demagogues and sweeping calamities that monopolise History, I've never looked too closely at the workaday, family history that created me and mine.

To paraphrase Stalin, whereas one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. My mum's newly fleshed out tales of poverty, struggle and strife, of fragile flesh and dreams mauled by those monsters and calamities, take on new reality when you know they happened to individuals with your DNA, your chin shape, your skin condition, perhaps even shades of your personality. They cease to be just ink on a census form, chiselled marks on the Menin Gate or a fraction of a percentile in the Beveridge Report.

The religion I was thinking of is ancestor worship. It's not that I believe my forebears have an indefinite tenure on some astral plain from which they observe, gossip and occasionally reach out to deflect me from bad relationships or distracted bus drivers. Nor am I likely to turn the alcove housing my HD TV and XBox360 into a shrine to anything other than louche living. I simply like the aspect of ancestor worship that isn't about prostrating yourself before the supernatural, but rather giving those who preceded you filial respect and understanding.

My maternal great-grandfather, despite being the ripe old age of 36, enlisted in 1916 and was killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. The direct hit on his communications trench left no remains fit to be interred or posted home. Although conscription was in full swing at the time, this relatively old man volunteered because with the khaki came food, accommodation and steady pay, all in limited supply at home.

His son always maintained that the wrong one was taken, as he and his siblings were left with a mother whose cruelty was equalled only by her fondness for the bottle. At an age when I'd have been playing with Action Man, granddad was picking coals from slagheaps while his dad was marching to the shambles. At an age when I'd have been contemplating 'O' levels and deciding whether to 'Choose Life', granddad was hacking at a coal face a thousand feet under Lancashire.

His experience moulded him. As a child, I was aware of a fidgety tension in him if we were toying with food or bickering. Only later did I learn of his passionate conviction that being spoiled was better then being beaten, and being wasteful was better than being hungry.

Snatching these moments from the clutches of oblivion isn't a question of becoming the next Catherine Cookson. It helps us to know who we are and how we came to be this way. It also shows us that our culture will seem as strange and remote to our descendants as it would to our long extinct ancestors. Keeping in touch with them can only make the transition easier.