One of the most valuable, yet bewildering, facets of parenthood is that it often makes you feel as if you have pressed an existential “fast forward” button. Everything seems to happen so quickly. Personally, I feel as if I am still learning to breathe my way through that first contraction, but no. Here I am with a four-year-old and a seven-year-old, already, and the four-year-old wants her own Frank Sinatra CD “because you godda love Frank”, and the seven-year-old wants her own e-mail address, so she can join Club Penguin.

Club Penguin is kind of like Second Life for kids - First Life, I guess, given that they haven’t really done much yet, except wobble their teeth around until they fall out. However, instead of being sexy avatars dressed in sexy Abercrombie & Fitch, who spend all day trying to have sex, as on Second Life, on Club Penguin the kids are just ovoid penguins in bobble hats, looking for fish. Activity revolves around sledging, igloo decoration and waddling very slowly between Antarctic points of pixelated interest, trying to find your online friends - also, inevitably, disguised as penguins.

Owned by Disney, and used by more than a million kids, Club Penguin is currently going through Dora’s school like some cyberpenguin version of MRSA. Before Christmas, we’d never heard of the thing. Three weeks later, however, and there’s 13 kids in Dora’s class “doing penguin”. Including Dora, now, of course - I couldn’t let my little princess be the only girl in her peer group not to have stunted, oily wings, and reek of fish.

As someone who has been “of the penguins” for a week now, I am finding it to be something of a mixed blessing.

On the one hand, it’s undeniably wonderful, on a rainy winter night, to have your child “playing” with her friends, and all without you having step outside the front door. Or, more pertinently, speak to her friends - particularly if it’s one of the “weird” ones who spend most of the play-date staring out of the window, saying “My mummy knows when I think about her. She says she can smell my love.” On the other hand, you live by the penguin, you must also die by the penguin. There are some penguin activities - notably an interminable flying penguin game - that Dora simply cannot operate on her own. Therefore, over the past few weeks, I have spent slightly more time steering a penguin over the tree-tops of an imaginary world than I have reading classic literature, doing something imaginative with quinoa or watching America’s Next Top Model. Effectively, I have become the mother of a cyberpenguin, somewhere along the line. This was a contraceptive eventuality I did not plan for.

However, when I wrote about Club Penguin on The Times’s Alphamummy site last week, I was surprised by many of the reactions to the idea of children joining online communities.

The concerns fell largely into two categories, the first being the presumption that online communities are a hotbed of paedophiliac activity. The worry for parents these days is that our children need fear not so much a dirty old man in a mac as a dirty old man with a Mac.

Well thankfully, in this respect, there’s a bit of a virtuous circle of neglect going on. Parking the kids in front of the computer all day has clearly made them borderline illiterate - so if anyone appeared on Club Penguin offering to “show” his “puppies”, the penguins wouldn’t have a clue what he was on about, and would carry on waddling around asking “hs anyon seen the pirut ship?” and typing “LOL” every time someone falls over.

The second concern centres on letting a computer entertain your child. There’s this lingering suspicion that any and all “electronic entertainments” - television, Nintendo, Dalek pinball machine in a chip shop - are a bit . . . chavvy. A bit . . . Kerry Katona. A bit . . . letting your child be raised by wolves.

“Whatever happened to playing with your real friends instead of ones in 2D?” one mother asked. Presumably this playing would be with wooden toys, out in the street, with jumpers for goalposts, etc.

Well, this all presupposes that your child has any friends and I, for one, find that quite offensive. Dora has, thankfully, managed to cobble together a small band of like-minded infants, similarly fixated on stickers, puppies and falling down the stairs while wearing their mothers’ high-heeled shoes. Heaven knows, however, that I didn’t manage this when I was a child. I was literally 10 before anyone at my school would do anything other than punch the back of my head, or disparage my lunch of muesli in a jar. I wish to God I’d been able to spend the evenings in an imaginary world, my unloveable reality hidden behind a pixelated rockhopper. Online communities mean that you at least have a fighting chance of finding a like-minded soul before you have to run away from home, at the age of 15, with Smalltown Boy echoing in your head. Perhaps, had I been a penguin as a child, so much of my soul would not reside in darkness.

And besides, unforeseen economic advantages are also beginning to present themselves. It’s Dora’s birthday next month. Do you know what topped her wish list? No High School Musical singing hot-water bottle this year. Nary a Polly Pocket You-Go-Girlfriend Reality Show Makeover Set to be seen. Heading her birthday wish list, handed to me yesterday, was . . . an igloo. Not a real igloo, you understand, but an imaginary igloo that you buy with the imaginary credits attained from catching imaginary fish in icy imaginary Antarctic waters. In the time it would take to go to Hamleys and come back, I can fish her an ice-palace designed and furnished in the style of Gianni Versace! It is, quite literally, a small price to pay.

What’s big, grey and gets you arrested?

Keeping an eye on the news pages, I note with relief that the Government has, finally, made it illegal for anyone to keep an elephant in the back garden. While it would, perhaps, have been ideal for them to have implemented the ban before Christmas - the period when pressure to buy an elephant, as a gift, is most intense - it is good to see that, ultimately, sense has been seen.

For those regretful that they didn’t buy a six-tonne pet before the loophole was closed, there is little comfort. Now you’ll never be able to have that gigantic Diwali elephant parade from the patio to the shed. Not while keeping your respectability, anyway.

Because, yes, there will still be back-garden elephants available. It’s just that their purchase will now, inevitably, follow an established path: a black market will spring up to service the continuing demand.

Just as there are drugs mules, so, now, there will be elephant mules - flying out to Africa, swallowing up to six elephants at a time, then flying back into Gatwick or Heathrow, bearing their illicit cargo. Certain pubs and clubs will become notorious for then fencing the gear - although working out which ones these are should be fairly simple, given that it wouldn’t work anywhere much smaller than the Ministry of Sound, and all guilty venues will have huge piles of dung outside them, consisting of 28 per cent peanuts, 72 per cent buns.

What I’m sure will be most concerning our law enforcement agencies, however, is the knock-on effect of criminalising domestic elephant use. Plunged into a seething underworld, desperate elephant users may find that keeping an elephant ultimately proves to be a “gateway activity”. The more vulnerable in our society may well attempt to keep even more extreme things in their back gardens: a herd of impala. Six million locusts. Volcanoes. A major tributary, or swamp.

Indeed, watching the news reports last week on the flooding in Tewkesbury, I think I may have detected an active hotspot for the last of these already. And all because of a lack of joined-up thinking at No 10. Whoever said that being in government was easy?

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