An intense love affair has been unravelling in our household and before our eyes over the last few months.

This is not Irene’s first love affair–that was probably chess, or Microsoft Publisher, or Adobe Photoshop or Power Point–but it is an intense one.
This affair is with her Ipod Touch.
After months of resistance–could I contribute to the death of an intellectual life?–I capitulated, but only if she used it for noble educational endeavours–listening to books on tape, she does that, corresponding with grandmothers etc, listening to French on it (I’m in love with French and a bossy mummy!) playing vocab games like scrabble and boggle, and anything serious I could think of.
Let’s blame Amazon’s single click ordering.
And as one might expect from an Apple product, it was elegant.
It sweetened the relentless culture of our trip to France. She looked at road maps, read about the places we were travelling to, downloaded games, played boggle and scrabble with Zoe on it, checked to see if we had free wi-fi in cities (we often did) and generally entranced her.
She updated her Facebook, wrote to her grandmother, cousins and her friend Phoebe on it.
It is the current love of her life. It does pretty much everything she requires a piece of technology to do. Isn’t it amazing how one can love, and be totally absorbed by a tiny sleek piece of technology. She is captivated with it, and I have used my will-power not to touch it!!
Now, I am debating–should I buy one for Zoe, or will this spell the death of the intellectual life?