What"s next? Sigourney Weaver makes a phone call using video link up in Aliens, more than 20 years ago
Midnight and I"m up watching the film Aliens on TV. Yes, I know, midnight!
Am I crazy? Drunk? Reckless? Sadly,none of the above, those days are long gone. It"s half-term, the onlytime parents with young children can happily stay up past 9.30pm.
We"re at the seaside, free from the demands of school runs andworking days. In the same way calories don"t count if you eat on themove, normal parenting rules don"t apply on holiday. So I can stay upas late as I like, thank you very much.
As I watch the formidable Sigourney Weaver, one scene fills mewith horror.
And it"s not the one where the alien queen tries to eat her. It"s the moment she makes a phone call using whatmust have seemed futuristic when the film was made more than 20 yearsago: a video link-up.
It suddenly dawned on me that this is the future for us as parents.
That even when our children leave home (and that may not be until they are in their 20s), they will still be in the same room with us, thanks to all this new technology.
My children may be on their gap-year trip halfway up Kilimanjaro, but they"ll still be able to be in my lounge via Skype (or whatever they"ll call it then), demanding we change the channel to something they want to watch.
"Oh my God," I said to Mr Candy as Aliens ended. "They will never leave us alone ever."
As our lives slow down and we start to enjoy things like gardening, our offspring will be stalking us, thanks to those annoying inventors at Apple (who are probably too busy making this stuff to have little fellas of their own and, therefore, don"t realise the effects of their weapons of mass communication).
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Space may be the only place we can go to get away from our trio of trouble. What"s even more of a worry is that I"ll have to learn how to use all this technology.
I"m the woman who put her iPod next to the computer thinking the songs would magically make their way from one to the other (Mr Candy laughed for half an hour). I come out in a sweat if I have to use the remote control.
Who knew? According to mobile phone giant Sony Ericsson, women spend more money on gadgets than shoes - on average, 391 a year"All this is a good thing," says Mr Candy, who welcomes evermore- complicated gadgets into his life like new friends.
"It means that when you go on business trips you will be able to feel like they"re with you, too."
Tomorrow, I"m off to Milan for the fashion shows I cover as part of my job. I"ve got an iPod loaded with videos and photos of the children. And a BlackBerry packed with images they secretly took themselves after they"d worked out my password (how they got the Airedale to pose in a pair of sunglasses and a pink cowboy hat I"ll never know).
But I think the jury"s out on whether this ever-developing technology is a good or bad thing for emotional working mums.
Sometimes, when I"m on the second day away from home, I"m missing mine so much I"m tempted to grab strangers" children and cuddle them.
By day three, I can"t really look at pictures of my own children or read the cards they always fill my handbag with any more. It"s too emotional.
When a note that said "Mummy I love you as big as the Wold" fell out of my passport at Customs once it reduced me and the normally stern woman at the desk to tears (without saying a word she patted my hand knowingly).
The thought of being able to see them every night via video when I am miles away may be more torture than comfort. But I guess we"ll just have to get our heads around it.
My seven-year- old has started early. Yesterday, she set up her own Amazon account and used the internet to help with her homework on Romans (she still can"t tie her left shoelace properly though).
She"ll be first on that videophone and is already demanding a mobile phone so she can use Twitter. There is no escape from Gracie in the middle either. She called me after school to tell me she had "something absolutely very important to explain".
Thinking she was about to tell me about some kind of educational achievement, I listened with bated breath.
"This week," she said solemnly, "is sweet potato week at school. What do you think about that?"
I had no idea how to reply.
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