Its sad, so very sad...

Somewhere in our house is a Sony Playstation 2.

Gathering dust in a box in a cupboard it rests there with its plethora of PS1 and PS2 game CD's, unwanted, unloved, un-needed.

We have moved on, me and my teenage daughters.

Somewhere in our house are two Sony Playstation 1 consoles, probably in the loft, probably in a landfill site somewhere actually, we have moved on, we no longer need them.

Which is more than can be said for these sad bas'tads here.

In my defence I will categorically state that I bought the Playstations for the girls, when they were young, they persuaded me that they were good things to buy and all their friends had one and they were as vital to a childs life as food was.

I caved into their demands after five minutes, bought them their first PS1 and some random games that were girly inspired plus two car racing games which I thought would be mildly amusing to my goodself - we then quickly aquired a second PS1 when the children complained that they couldn't get to use the first one because I was never off the bloody thing.

When the time came to upgrade to PS2 we did so, but by now the eldest daughter had grown tired of gaming and moved on to horses, real horses. The youngest however wanted a PS2 so that she could play a game called "Crazy Taxi" which turned out to be the only specific PS2 game we ever bought - daughter number 2 grew tired of Crazy Taxi an hour after we had bought it and the whole kit was dumped unceremoniously somewhere where it still probably lies until we move house sometime soon (more on that later).

So we moved on from gaming, in the same way that you can never watch a dvd film more than twice, we found it mind numbingly boring to start the same game and use the same procedures to get to the same level in the same time, every time we played any of the games - its boring, simple as.

So why do these people quit their jobs and sleep on streets for several nights on the strength of a rumour that one shop may have some stock of whatever is the latest "box" to have this christmas ?

What sort of a brain does a person need inside their head to spend their whole waking life clicking buttons, waggling joysticks, and imagining that they really are killing deadly laser toting Quarks from the planet Zarg in order to save the world, how many times do you actually play at being a soldier in a combat zone before you actually believe that you really are a soldier in a combat zone and walk down the street shooting random people - and more importantly and more pertinent, how many times do you drive your imaginary car the wrong way down a one way street smashing any vehicles out of your way without damage to your car or yourself, before you steal a real car and try to do the same thing ?

Or does none of that really happen and its just a harmless way of keeping nerds off the street who would otherwise annoy the rest of us in so many other ways ?

Carry on queueing nerds, it makes good news stories and the rest of us get to put the shopping down for a few minutes and laugh at you before we have to carry on with our real lives.