THERE are several things I've noticed since I've become a grandad, things that have changed in my life. Some of these things are very good, having grandchildren for instance.

That bit of the granddad experience is absolutely fantastic. Awesome even. At a push, I might be prepared to admit that it is breathtakingly brilliant. But that tale – as they say, dear reader - is for another day and another column.

No, what I'm thinking about right now are some of the other bits that are not so good.

Strange sprouty hairs have started to grow out of my ears and my nostrils. That's not good.

And what makes it worse is that my grown up kids take great delight in pointing them out to me and doing helpful things like buying me tweezers. Man tweezers! Who ever heard of such a thing?

To make matters worse, they wait until I'm busy watching telly then they sneak up on me and pluck these hairs out by the bucketful. Aaaargh!

Then they accuse me of squealing like a schoolgirl.

Which is insulting, very insulting. Schoolgirls could probably cope with that sort of thing much better than me. They pluck their eyebrows all the time, apparently.

I can't help myself. I shout at the telly. All the time.

To be fair, it's usually when the people on it are talking rubbish. But not always. Sometimes I just shout because I'm jealous.

The other day I was in a tiny airless hotel room. I had spent the day filming in a tiny airless studio and I was feeling a bit tired and emotional. I flicked on the telly just in time to catch one of those short films about how the BBC make their brilliant Natural History shows. And I saw a friend of mine, sitting in a boat filming polar bears. Oooh that got me shouting.

Now I love technology as much as the next person. I bought a computer as soon as I could afford one. Admittedly, it was pretty much powered by steam and would have taken about three weeks to print this column. But I loved it anyway.

I got onto the internet almost as soon as it was invented. Mainly because I'm always keen to save money.

A friend who lives in The North told me all about it and got particularly excited about the idea of email. I can still hear his voice now as he told me that if we both got ourselves connected to the internet and got an email address each, we would never have to buy another postage stamp ever again.

Wow! That seemed like a pretty bold claim to me.

The internet could replace the postage stamp? Never! But I stuck with it, through all those dark days of the digital age when we had to get our computer to 'dialup'. Oh, the pain. The suffering!

We only had one phone line in a household with six people in it. Imagine trying to live life like that now? That poor old phone line struggled to cope with several teenager love lives and a computer all at the same time.

I even got on board with Facebook. Well, truth be told my youngest son, otherwise known as The IT Dept, got me on board with it. My excuse is that both of our daughters had left the country for a couple of years.

One was in Germany and one was in Vietnam. So one way to keep in touch was to sign up to Facebook and share photos.

Lovely. We got to see the girls' holiday snaps whilst they were still on holiday.

Sometimes we even got to see pictures before they had sobered up enough to realise that they needed to take them offline before we saw them. Tee hee!

But now both daughters are safely back in the country and living in Bristol with their families. So Facebook has taken a backseat.

As for Twitter – I've got an account and I've tried to work it but sadly The IT Dept doesn't tweet, so I'm on my own.

But that's not the bit that baffles me most. The prize for that goes to Moshi Monsters.

It's my own fault. I let my grandkids into my office when I was working. Moments later they had each got some sort of virtual monster thing. Don't ask me how it works – I haven't a clue. But these monsters need to be fed every day and I'm the one with the computer.

So every day when I log on to start my days work, I have to spend the first few hours playing games to earn food and happiness points for my grandkids' monsters. And that baffles me!