Hobbies, sport? No way, my son's a gadget fiend

In fact Raymond was never happier than when his friend from London appeared sporting a PSP (PlayStation Portable), a Nintendo DS, an iPod, a mobile telephone plus a portable DVD player.

Consequently they spent the next few days getting overexcited about a game which seemed to involve looking after pet dogs (apparently it's called Nintendogs) while the real one stood in front of them.

A week later, Raymond followed his friend up to London. I went with him for a couple of days and managed to persuade him and London Boy to accompany me to the Natural History Museum.

"Look!" I said, waving my hands at elephants and sealions but they couldn't have been less interested.

"They're just a bunch of stuffed animals," said Raymond. "No one should've killed them anyway. It's barbaric." They found Madame Tussauds similarly boring "I prefer playing Conquerors on my computer," said Raymond.

By the time I offered a quick look at the changing guard of Buckingham Palace, they had virtually gone on strike. "Men in silly hats," they both said. "No thanks." So we went back to London Boy's house and they both got extremely excited about playing tennis against each other on the Nintendo Wii followed by a quick bit of wrestling. Raymond went to bed smiling.

So finally I have had to accept that Raymond is part of the iPod generation. This doesn't mean he can't read or write, it's just that to him, during the holidays, a football game played on a PSP seems more relevant than a tour round Westminster Abbey. A quick blast of Tomb Raider or whatever is far more thrilling than staring at wallmounted guns in the Imperial War Museum and an iPod gives him a permanent soundtrack to his life.

Maybe we should all stop worrying about it. By the time Raymond leaves school perhaps being able to be an "expert" in using an iPod (hardly exacting, I have to say) or being superfast on the internet will be far more important than doing the tours of churches and art galleries that bored me so as a youngster.

Acceptance, I fear, is the only logical way forward. What else can you do when these ever-evolving gadgets seem the only things relevant to his generation?