Playstation

Emily is full of get-rich-quick schemes to supplement the meagre one euro a week I give her as pocket money. Most of these would probably be described by an impartial observer as "scams", but Emily is convinced they represent great opportunities offering unparalelled value for money. One idea was to scrape the paint off the outside of pencils and sell it as gold dust (I've no idea how many gullible classmates she fleeced with that one), and then she moved on to board games, where I suspect she priced herself out of the market by asking fifty cents for what was to all intents and purposes a piece of paper with squares drawn on it.

Her latest money-making wheeze is to make a game for Playstation.

Emily: Daddy, I'm going to make a game for Playstation.

Me: [Doubtfully] Really darling? I'm not sure that's possible.

Emily: Yes it is, Dad. I'm going to make it with my friend Constantinos and we're going to sell it for twenty euros and it's going to have lots of skeletons fighting soldiers and lots of people have already said they want it!

This is a tricky one. I can see how excited she is, and she clearly wants me to tell her what a good idea it is - but on the other hand I don't want her to be disappointed (there's clearly no way I can let her go away with the idea that this might be possible). And I'm also afraid she's going to start taking deposits for advance orders. So I have to try and let her down gently.

Me: That sounds ever so exciting my love, but it's not so easy to write a Playstation game, you know. You need to have a very big computer and work for a big company and then you have to put the game onto a floppy disk - well, more like a CD, in fact, or a DVD actually - well no, in fact it's more like a CD-Rom, I suppose-

Emily: [Cutting me off sharply as she realises how far out of my depth I am] Dad, you just don't understand. We have modern technology nowadays. We're not still living in 1979 [i.e. when homo erectus first walked the Earth...]