Actually his favourite toys aren’t toys at all. He seems to understand that hammering away at a V-Tech activity centre won’t actually achieve anything, but a single deft depression of That Button That Daddy Explicitly Told Me Not To Touch will have much more exciting results (including said Daddy jumping up and growling amusingly).

His absolute favourite toy is the washing machine. This is button and knob nirvana, and as an added bonus it also has a hatch that you can concertedly pile clothes in to (and out of… and back into again… and out again… for hours).

Seriously, if we could just trust him with the powder and fabric conditioner we could buy a dozen washing machines and have quite a nice little laundry business on our hands.

Hmm, yep, even after thinking it through properly, I can’t see any flaw in that idea.

Really though, I shouldn’t be surprised that Tom seems to be turning into a little gadget freak. This is the world he was born in to. Even when he was very little I used to amuse him with toys and videos on an iPhone. Now he’s reached the stage where he can switch my iPhone on, slide the switch to unlock the screen, swipe through the screens of icons, find the folder full of toddler toys, and open up The Three Little Pigs story app; all in the time it takes to change a nappy.

For a little boy who can’t yet reliably make it across the front room without falling over, I find this seriously impressive.

That’s how babies minds work, I think, they thrive on discovered predictability. It’s not enough to try something once to see what happens, you have to do it again to see if what happened still happens. Then do it a dozen or so more times just to really be sure. While I watch Tom doing it, I can almost hear the little neurons in his bonce strengthening by repeated use.

Tom’s at an age where he’s still learning about the basic physical properties of the world around him, and predictability is important. Balls bounce, wheels roll, blocks stack or tumble.

One of Tom’s Christmas presents was an electronic activity centre. The V-Tech “My First Steps Walker”, a baby walker with a panel on the front featuring an electronic cornucopia of lights and buttons for little fingers to press. I’m a gadget freak, so it’s actually to my surprise that, where toys are concerned, I’ve become a bit of a Luddite. Because for all its electronic wizardry, the My First Steps Walker isn’t predictable, and that makes me question its value as a toy for very small kids.

Press the blue circular button marked with a “1” and a friendly lady’s voice will say “one!”, but press it again and it says instead “blue circle!”. So is the little tyke supposed to learn that blue circular buttons say “one”, or that buttons marked “1” say “blue circle”?

It gets worse than that; flip the wings of the yellow plastic butterfly and the whole gadget changes function. Now it’s not “teaching” about shapes and colours and numbers, it’s teaching about “music”. The blue circular button doesn’t say “blue” or “circle” or “one”; now it says “rock and roll!”, and launches into the least rock-and-roll bit of music you’ve ever heard.

Now, I know eventually Tom will need to learn that things aren’t predictable, and that most buttons on electronic gadgetry do different things at different times. Eventually, probably sooner rather than later, he’ll work out that a computer can do an infinite number of things with just a few dozen buttons. But first, I think, he needs the predictability. He need to press the blue circular button and for it to say “blue circle!” every time, so that he delights in the fact that he predicted it was going to say that.

I wouldn’t take the V-Tech walker away from him, because he enjoys bashing away at it, particularly the spinny cogs bit. But I don’t think it’s really teaching him much yet, and I’d much rather he spent an instructive 5 minutes repeatedly dropping the same ball into the same hole. Unpredictability can wait.

Yesterday I got a new bike. Not anything too fancy, but it’s quite a nice one and more than I’d have been able to afford if it wasn’t for the tax-free bike scheme being run by my employer.

It’s nice to have something big and new and “mine”. I’ve not bought anything major for myself since Tom was born, long gone are the days when I’d shell out for a new gadget on a whim and worry about the finances later.

One of the biggest pleasures of buying a New Thing of any variety, I think you’ll agree, is the bit where you sit down to have a proper read of the manual. Not before you’ve had a play with it, of course. You’d have to be made of stone (or possibly, a woman) to not have a good muck about with a new toy – and possibly break it a little bit because you don’t know what you’re doing – before sitting down with the manual to find out what you’re supposed to be doing.

But these days, I find, the manual is one area where manufacturers really let themselves down. They see the manual as a extra, not part of the product experience, as it should be.

Take, for example, the manual that came with my new bike. It was a one-size-fits-all manual written for the manufacturer’s entire range of bikes. Virtually everything from a child’s trike to one of those things that are designed for elegantly falling down mountains.

Half of the book, presumably on the advice of their lawyers, is dedicated to safety. It starts off with this chestnut:

Many of the Warnings and Cautions say “you may lose control and fall”. Because any fall can result in seriously injury or even death, we do not repeat the warning of possible injury or death.

Which is great because it’s bad enough wading through 10 pages of safety information without being constantly reminded of the ever-present spectre of Death.

Another section about riding safely, which I’ve edited for brevity’s sake, says:

Look ahead, be ready to avoid: vehicles slowing, turning, entering the road, coming up behind you, parked cars opening doors, pedestrians, children, pets, pot holes, sewer gratings, railroad tracks, expansion joints, road or sidewalk constructions…

… at this point the lawyers walked in on the manual’s author and pointed out that they’d had a brainstorming session and come up with another 5000 hazards, and the manual was going to need to be 300 pages thick, so he decided it would easier just to add…

The many other hazards and distractions which can occur on a bicycle ride.

After reading that lot I don’t want to leave the house, let alone get on a bike.

Then we get on to the meat of the manual, what can my bike actually do? This is where the one-size-fits-all mentality of the manufacturer kicks in.

Your new human-powered vehicle may have anything between one to three wheels. Depending on the make and model that you have purchased, it may be fitted with any of the following: gears, pedals, a saddle, a butler, anti-aircraft missiles, Spokey Dokeys.

Okay so I made that up, but it’s essential the style of the manual. Try and tell you everything about every bike, and end up telling you nothing about your bike. When they should be taking you by the hand and showing you, with maybe a bit of passion, all the neat little features and clever advances in bike tech that explain why it’s 10 times more expensive than your first Raleigh Grifter.

Because, call me a geek, but I want to know that kind of stuff.

You might just spot the resident pair of robins, flitting in to eat the raisins on the lawn.

Any silly comments about the tits will be summarily removed!

The patient

Jane and I both love our iPod Touches, the iPhone for people who don’t want or can’t have an iPhone. Jane in particular has been using hers loads during her pregnancy. She’s got a lot to lug around without adding a laptop.

So it was rather awful when she announced grim-faced at the weekend that she’d dropped it in water. I won’t say which body of household water she dropped it in. She had it in a back pocket of some baggy pregnancy jeans, you can use your imagination.

It was only in the (clean, I hasten to add!) water for about 10 seconds, but that was enough for the water to get in through the interface port and kill the thing stone dead.

Not good.

We left it sitting on the boiler for a day, hoping it would dry out, but it still remained steadfastly brick-like. I started looking up stuff on the internet, and came across the old chestnut of leaving a water-soaked mobile or other gadget in a bowl of dried rice to “draw out the moisture”. How this is supposed to work, I have no idea, does the water deep inside the gadget somehow know the rice is outside, and wanders out to have a look?

If rice were some kind of high-powered dessicant I think they’d put a Vesta risotto in the bottom of hi-fi boxes, but they seem to stick with those little sachets of silica gel.

(As an aside, have you ever wondered what would actually happen if you ate one of those little sachets? I can only imagine it would be something like when Jerry tricked Tom into eating alum powder and his mouth puckered up like the end of a party balloon.)

Anyway, in desperation we tried the kill-or-cure solution: cooking it.

We put the oven on a low heat (about 50), with the door slightly ajar to allow the moisture to escape and stop the temperature getting too high (in theory). The iPod was positioned near the back, with the hole for the interface cable facing the fan at the back of the oven.

And left it for about an hour.

After removing it with oven gloves, and allowing it to cool, I tried the power button. Miraculously, the boot screen appeared.

And wouldn’t go away. There was also a kind of mottled pattern behind the display. Looking kind of like a lot of moisure behind a display would look.

So tonight I returned the iPod to the oven for another hour-long stint at 75 degrees C.

It seems to have worked! The screen is back to normal, and it’s now sitting up in bed and taking fluids. Well, when I say fluids I mean electricity, it’s learnt its lesson there.