HAVE spent much of the week researching a project about gadgets, which has turned out to be a great deal more fun than I had envisaged. The word gadget to me conjured up geeks, anorak techies, and hideously unreadable manuals which don't make any sense to normal people.

Gadgets are generally things that eat into my time and make me annoyed because they never work straight out of the box, or if they do they invariably stop working once they're out of guarantee.

You see, just the word sends me into a bit of a rant - they always promise so much and deliver very little. I have a kitchen cupboard to prove it, stuffed full of all my gadget mistakes - the breadmaker from hell that, yes, does make bread but with a stupid hole in the bottom where the paddle goes round and the bread is of such appalling consistency that even the birds rejected the last batch when I managed to heave the loaf on to the bird table. The gadget mistake cupboard also has a popcorn maker and an ice cream maker - both unused because I don't really like popcorn that much, ice cream is better from the freezer section in Tesco and, more importantly, I have a life.

However, having spent a bit of time this week talking to gadget experts and enthusiasts I am rather won over - because I have now discovered the rich seam of fabulously bonkers gadgets that make me laugh out loud. Things like a Japanese romper suit for babies with dusters on the elbows and knees so that when baby is crawling it dusts the floor at the same time, or the mobile phone with a halitosis meter (how useful would that be for some people we know!), a pet door bell which you can train your dog or cat to press with their paw so that you know when they want to come back indoors having gone out for a comfort break or caught a mouse ... or the sweetie jar that will only open once a day to control your calorie intake.

So now suddenly I have developed a bit of a gadget habit and if I am not careful I will become a serial gadget buyer. But most of all I want a Nintendo brain trainer designed to keep the nearly senile middleaged woman like me up to speed and presumably to help me keep the dementia at bay.

This could be a life-saver since my memory is going decidedly fuzzy round the edges and some days I have trouble remembering my PIN number (the time it takes from decoding my PIN number cryptic code breaker chart, which is tragically on my person and getting the numbers into the cashpoint ...) Which is a bit feeble really. The brain trainer thing apparently tells you your mental age (which can be as high as 112) and aims to get your mental age down with practise.

It flashes up questions like the nine times table, short-term memory tests and generally is mentally challenging but in an addictive sort of way. I was never very good at my nine times table, so I imagine my mental age is going to be way up in the telephone numbers but now I have come over all gadget mad I plan to get one - although I think I might get mental age down to at least double figures before I share it with anyone else.

Unfortunately there is a snag; gadgets don't do the things in life we really want them to.

All that talk when we were in our teens and early 20s which promised that we would all be living in space, eating powdered food and time-travelling by now has turned out to be a load of codswallop.

Yes, we are all now wired up to ipods, mobiles and the internet - but still no one has invented a machine to do the ironing, shift the mess off a nasty saucepan or invented some glue that actually works for more than about half an hour.

Nor has anyone invented a robot that does all the unbelievably tedious personal admin that seems to come with everyday life now, or a robot to sit on phone queues or fill in forms for you. It's high time someone invented a gadget that would do the following - all my ironing including knowing which things need to be ironed inside out, pick up towels and cereal bowls after teenagers, remake the bed after my husband has "made" it, and fill in my tax form. That'll do to begin with. I think it might be called a maid, or a PA, or a wife - none of which I have sadly. But I might need to work on it.