Computer junkies 2

Dear Tiger,

This house has fallen deathly quiet, and now we know for sure that Shark has taken possession of her very own computer.

You know it too, because you are a changed character.

For a long while, you, Shark and Squirrel have shared one computer. This has taxed us all. Although we developed imagination in your time-share, nothing was satisfactory. The clock system didn't work, neither the egg-timer, nor the log book, nor the oranges, nor the unicorns, nor quite frankly, anything. The only times sharing has worked has been a sudden, unpredictable coincidence of interests, which has allied you, one body, three heads, clustered around the screen. Then woe betide a mummy or a daddy come to tell you all it might be time for bed.

Yet you are now released from the necessity to share. While daddy goes off to sort out Squirrel's computer, you have the front room computer all to yourself. You no longer jealously lean over the keyboard, defensively grip the monitor, nor hang onto the graphics tablet like this is coming with you to the grave, so just try removing it from your determined grasp.

You are right. Corel Draw is all yours. You know your way about this software blindfold, although of course that is not your preferred drawing approach.

And while I am glad you can now begin your career in illustration in earnest, your sole charge of the computer worries me, a little.

I know that when you work, you become so focused on what you are doing, that hours may pass and they are but a second to you. If I call you after two hours, you never hear me. Give it another fifty minutes and I become an irritating buzz somewhere in the house, despite my amplification next to you via a trombone, megaphone and platform tannoy system.

It is this streak you have: the teenage boy whose light bulb moment is to use a wastepaper basket as a commode bucket under the desk because he is destroying zombie flesh eaters and getting his virtual hands on the girl with the big boobs and forget the planet because look at the size of those boobs.

This total focus on a task, and complete dedication to a purpose, is in your nature. To this point, it has been thwarted by the presence of your sisters who declare it is my turn.

With that imperative removed, I may well wish it was back again, because at some point as I am setting up the cannon to deliver the BOOM in the hope I catch your attention, I will then consider the scenarios and think that breaking up a fight over whose turn it is was probably preferable to emptying the wastepaper basket.