I SPENT last Friday at the Eden Project where the media were given a preview of this fantastic place. I don't think anyone was anything but overwhelmed by the sheer size of the biomes and amazed by the plants settling happily into their new homes.

Trotting round the humid tropic biome (and my advice to any female who visits is to buy extra hold hair spray because it's death to the artfully styled flowing locks look) I was on the look out for slugs.

Where were they? Hadn't they heard about Eden? It could be the answer for all us gardeners who have an ongoing and usually losing battle with the beastly things. All we have to do is to point them in the direction of Eden, give them a little push of encouragement to get them going and explain about the lush dripping vegetation and the tasty succulent plants just waiting to be put on the menu. And not a nasty little blue slug pellet in sight.

Eden, at the moment, appears to be slug-less and snail-less, or at least none that I could see as I peered through giant banana leaves and up rubber trees. I wanted to ask one of the many experts who had been lined up on a kind of shopping list for us media folk to interview but I felt it was imposing a little to book an expert only to ask him or her if there were any slugs. It could have been embarrassing if they hadn't thought of slugs.

I understand the tropic biome will be having butterflies, presumably of a kind which would be found in such living conditions in many parts of the world. Which hopefully cancels out cabbage whites.

There will, however, be no animals, birds or, thank goodness, snakes. All right, the purists will no doubt be saying it doesn't represent a true rainforest if there are no snakes, but nobody wants to eyeball a black mamba when leaning over to sniff an orchid do they? Visitor numbers would drop.

My only negative feeling about Eden was sheer jealousy at the size of the greenhouse. It's the same feeling I get when I visit any kind of Ideal Home Exhibition. Prior to the visit I'm quite happy with my own home, afterwards it looks so dreadfully drab, old fashioned and tatty that I sink into a depression for weeks afterwards and usually unwisely strip wallpaper off the nearest wall.

Before Eden I had been equally happy with my greenhouse. Post Eden it feels like a cloche and besides, I do have slugs in it, as well as five generations of woodlice and probably many other invaders.

What I don't have is heat and won't have if I don't solve an ongoing problem with a little greenhouse heater I bought weeks ago but have so far failed to put together.

This is purely down to the inadequate instructions which came with it which provide a blurred picture, a list of what the box should contain and just few lines on how to erect it. I may have been able to work out that the round things with a hole at each end was the chimney (but not which way up it went ) that the flat container was the base and that from the picture the wire racks went at the side but no way can I work out how to attach it all together. It does point out firmly that I mustn't use anything other than paraffin, but as the thing is called a paraffin heater I was highly unlikely to stuff it with coal or try to connect it to the electricity.

This is just one example of instructions which are apparently written either by the managing director's pre-school aged child or a visiting Martian. And they drive us all mad.

If you complain the general impression given is that you are the idiot. Everyone else understood that if you are told to put screw 234 into screwhole 21 and screwhole 21 just isn't there then the logical thing is to turn the whole thing upside down and read the instructions backwards. Are you a complete fool or what?

I once bought a small plastic covered greenhouse which from the pictures looked like it would fit neatly onto the paved area behind my previous house. It had several layers of staging and a roll top on either side. Perfect for seedlings and to keep plants warm. Among the other flowery descriptions on the advert were the words 'easy to assemble'. I soon realised why the words were in inverted commas. There should also have been an exclamation mark at the end just to give us an indication that this was meant as an ironic remark and not a statement of fact.

My son, who was always quite good at Meccano when he was a child, so thinks he's the world's expert in putting things together, promised to build it. Therefore when it arrived I pointed him in the direction of the garden and left him to it and went shopping. When I returned several hours later I found him sitting on the ground surrounded by dozens of bits, rolls of plastic, pointy sticks and lots of metal slats. He was turning the instruction book round and round in a demented fashion.

I will not bore you with the details suffice to say that the 'easy to assemble' greenhouse would have taken the combined efforts of Stephen Hawken and Albert Einstein (and perhaps now the designer of Eden's biomes) to erect it without a threatened nervous breakdown and several rows the sound of which must have carried halfway over the county and damaged mother/son relationship for quite a number of weeks to come.

Actually, I wonder if Eden's biomes came with an instruction book the size of War and Peace and about as indecipherable as the Dead Sea Scrolls? I can just imagine it. 'Put hexagonal or eight sided piece number 845 next to eight sided or hexagonal piece 234, turn slightly to the left and click firmly into place holding piece number 43 and piece number 98 in your left hand while rotating the pixels on the outer edge firmly to your right. Repeat with all other parts marked with a small brown dot which may or may not be missing.'

I am now devising a television game in which the owners or managers of firms which send out items in bits with less than acceptable instructions will be locked in a room with their most complicated item and forced to construct it with a time limit with penalties for those who cry, throw things around, kick the walls and/or tear the instructions into small pieces and attempt to eat them.

I'll be the Ann Robinson character and I'll be carrying the cattle prod.

I could be on to a winner here.