I HAVE always been a pushover for gadgets and innovative technology. As a child, for instance, I was fascinated by magnets that behaved in a way that contradicted all the accepted rules of scientific knowledge. When the ability to record television programmes came along, I was one of the first people I knew who simply had to have a VCR – remember them.

Thankfully, I didn’t go down the Betamax route at a time when my wiser technophile friends were bigging that up as the only way to go. Now however I have boxes of VHS recordings, mainly of children’s shows that were popular when my daughters were young, that I cannot bear to dispose of the only sensible way – the rubbish tip.

Then – mobile phones. I have fond memories of my first half-brick with a preposterous aerial. They all diminished in size and have now started to slowly get bigger again, though I doubt they will ever go the distance back to the first less appropriately named ‘mobiles’.

I acknowledge that it is a boy thing. Mobile phones, tablets, computers and tech are rarely subjects for discussion with my daughters but when their boyfriends visit there is no stopping us. I have recently, like a big kid, been showing off my latest acquisition virtual reality goggles. Just pop your mobile phone into them, armed with the appropriate app, and off you go wandering round the haunted house or riding a big dipper.

Too long with a screen millimetres from your eyes and without awareness of the real environment you are in can only be ultimately fraught with danger for health and security and they will I suspect will be a short term fad like the Tamagotchi digital pets of the 1990s; (and I remember having to feed one of those wretched things regularly for my daughter while she was at school).

The latest fad is sleep replacement headset/goggles. We all need sleep, but research has established that the benefits of a good night’s sleep can be neurologically mimicked by stimulated light and benign radiation through the eyes so that twenty minutes of targeted emissions can stimulate the areas of the brain that is refreshed by REM neural activity in a normal seven hour sleep.

Handy for the Trumps and Thatchers of this world. But I like my sleep too much.

As they say in France it is the day of the fish!