I WAS most gratified this week to be told by my elder daughter that my granddaughter Chloe, who is eight on the day after Boxing Day, adores Winnie the Pooh.

I adored Winnie the Pooh at her age, and read and re-read the books till I knew them by heart. I loved Tigger and Eyeore best, and still have my first copy of a Pooh book, in a very much dog-eared condition.

So I was delighted to find that Chloe has discovered Pooh and friends and I was prepared to rush out and find a complete set of the books.

But oh no, that wouldn't do. I was ordered to go in search of something called a 'Winnie the Pooh and the 100 acre wood Gameboy Game'.

I think I'd be even more annoyed if I knew what the hell that was.

As far as I know a Gameboy is a small irritating hand-held machine which youngsters operate when they are sitting in the back of your car and you can't get at them. It makes highly annoying bleeps and for some reason I can never see the screen clearly enough to find out what's going on.The only saving grace is that it's pretty easy to kill if you accidentally tread on it.

I can't bear to think that my favourite bear would be involved in something like that. What have they done, issued Winnie with a machine gun to kill mad kung fu experts who look like Tigger and Eyeore and little Piglet? The next thing you'll tell me that Rupert Bear is now the main character in Dungeons and Dragons.

Half an hour after imparting this piece of information my daughter rang back and said 'Look, I don't think it's a good idea if you go into a shop asking about Gameboy games because you'll buy the wrong one. I'll ring Woolworths and ask if they have a Winnie the Pooh game and ask them to put it on one side if they have and you can collect it'. Which roughly translated means 'my daft old mum wouldn't know a Gameboy game if it sat on her head so can you give her the idiot guide to buying the right one?' Fortunately Woolworths didn't have any.

She was right of course. I couldn't buy a Gameboy game. Nor could I buy a DVD. I don't even know what that stands for and I'm blowed if I'll ask anyone. The world is now full of initials. CDs, VCRs, PCs (no not the constabulary kind), APS, etc, etc (I know what etc means, I'm not completely thick).

I've always had trouble with initials and what they stand for. After all, I once wrote that the RSPB stood for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Birds and received a very disgruntled letter for my pains.

Nothing is simple any more is it? When I first had a mobile telephone, and finally managed to work out how to switch it on, someone asked me if it was digital or analogue. I somehow sussed that the answer was probably not 'Yes' and mumbled something that sounded like 'analogue' and was then given a lecture on the merits of digital over analogue which might as well have been in spoken in an obscure Mongolian dialect for all I understood it.

I suppose it's progress, but I sometimes think how nice it would be to live in an age when you were born and died to the sound of a wooden wheeled cart driving past your house without discovering halfway through that someone had upgraded it into a four stroke 65 litre wire wheeled sports model coupé with ABS and power steering and a security system you needed a degree in quantum physics to fathom.

As Christmas gallops towards us I think I can smugly say that I seem to have found the key to a stress free festive period - leave the country. My colleagues are becoming somewhat irritated by this as I reel off yet another item I don't have to worry about this year.

Gift buying has been reduced to a minimum as I'm going to do it when I get there. I don't have to buy any food or drink and I've even escaped the agonising eternal search for the perfectly shaped Christmas tree, a tree which exists only in legend. The reality is usually a tree with some fault, either an alarming list to one side, a bald spot which you don't notice till you get home or a ridiculously long sharp bit on the top which could get you reported to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Fairies if you attempted to stick anything up there.

The only hitch so far is my daughter's increasingly long shopping list, a new item remembered each day. At the moment it includes several pounds of proper butchers' pork sausages which they say they can't possibly do without even though they live in the land of the sausage and taking sausages to Germany is even worse than coals to Newcastle. In fact I'll probably get picked up by the sausage police at the airport.

And for the record I'm taking SWC, SWL, SWP, LWM and CWMAD. So we might be able to have B and M for dinner. We can all play at this game if we try hard enough.

Next week - a little Christmas fable to see you through the trials and tribulations of the chipolata season.