What not to get for Christmas!

An article in Saturday's issue of The Times (Unknown Father Should Be Abolished) has ironed out a social problem of some importance to me: the lack of real communication between people. What a piece of luck I even came across it!

"The addiction to computers, television, iPods and other electronic games among parents and children is the cause of reduced communication in the family," parliamentarians said.

What a relief! There I was all along imagining that reduced or no communication was the fault of soul-destroying work, unhappy marriages, financial insecurity, inept upbringing, marital deception and opportunism, religious superstition, sexual dissatisfaction, the frantic pace of life in a consumer economy, constant status-seeking and sexual posturing, feelings of inadequacy and lack of purpose, idiotic preconceptions of what family life should be cruelly dashed by grim reality, the lies and illusions about "love" injected into the social consciousness by the unscrupulous media, odious comparison-shopping, gold-digging and trading-up, the utter lack of anything interesting worth talking about, the vacuity and bluff of our vaunted "culture" and, of course, the congenital imbecility of a nation that genuinely equates its worth with the amount of useless junk it can accumulate during a lifetime.

I'm glad it's really all the iPod's fault. At least now I know what not to get my friends for Christmas.