THE video player is playing up and it’s nearly Christmas.

Despite everyone in the house spending half their lives on the internet, it still remains critically important to harmonious family life that we have the ability to tape things on TV.

Of course, it’s not actually a video player anymore but a hard disc recorder which – using magic – can tape two things at once.

The problems arise when you want to tape two programmes and watch a third, meaning you have to make use of those channels which broadcast programmes an hour later than scheduled.

Of course it used to be even more complicated. Taping a programme on the first VHS recorders was as fiddly as heart surgery. I can still vividly remember the joy when the parents took delivery of a recorder fitted with Videoplus which allowed you to tape stuff using numbers printed in the Radio Times.

As an aside, it probably came from Rumbelows in Leyburn. I seem to remember the folks renting a telephone from the same shop, which you did back then before Argos was opened, and working out that after ten years it had cost them £500.

The Videoplus system was also not without its faults. I still have the mental scars of being immersed in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, only for the film to stop ten minutes from the end because the news had overrun.

There were tears before bedtime that night, I can tell you.

On an unrelated topic, the youngest boy’s picture has appeared in the paper yet again – this time alongside teammates from Leyburn United U7s. It’s getting a bit embarrassing, if I’m honest.

I promise it’s more a reflection of his hectic social life – football, rugby, beavers, craft events etc – and D&S correspondent Philip Sedgwick’s heavy workload than an example of me abusing my position.

There is, however, evidence that the exposure is going to his head.

Asked at school last week to write about someone famous, he announced that while his friends wrote about Wayne Rooney, he had been in the paper eight times now and would be spending the afternoon filling a whole page on the topic of himself.