THE smacking debate returns just as Microsoft announces that it has won the patent to "transmit power and data using the human skin".

While smacking, for good or bad, is familiar to everyone, what Microsoft proposes is less so.

Indeed, so alien is the concept that it may take a bit of explaining slowly and in a loud voice.

So long as too much of this hasn't gone over the top of my head, the idea seems to be this: the human body, being a collection of tubes, tissues and salty liquids, can be used to transmit information.

Microsoft envisages using skin to conduct messages between a host of electronic devices. If all goes to plan - and what an exciting plan it is - your earrings could talk to you and your spectacles could flash up images and video footage.

This is great news for those of us who find life is far too simple and fear we are missing out on having a conversation with our own ears. Better still for those technological simpletons who still like to look through their glasses in the hope merely of seeing a little more clearly.

Imagine what fun we will have walking around with video images flashing in front of our eyes just as we are about to cross a busy road.

Still there could be advantages.

At work you could sit in a meeting, feigning interest while watching Coronation Street, the cricket or one of the many films you missed on their release, thanks to the demands of all the child-shaped people in the family.

Miscrosoft apparently believes that sending signals through the skin will get round some of the problems encountered with existing techniques. Anyone who has used a computer employing Microsoft will be thrilled to hear this, because nothing could be more reassuring than knowing that the people who designed the program that crashes without warning, shortly after suggesting an eccentric grammatical change, now want to send messages through your body.

Only the most persistent of Luddites will conjure up a worrisome scenario in which a message flashing from your big toe to your furrowed brow tells you that your nervous system has just performed an illegal operation and your feet need re-booting.

Attentive readers may wonder what all of this has to do with smacking. Well, it's only a theory but here goes. Eventually sensors around the body could monitor health, with earrings, for example, being used to read pulse rates.

It is even envisaged that by shaking hands with your doctor, you could transmit all the necessary info from your body to his limbs and then straight into his computer ("oh no, it's her with the sweaty feet").

In such a technologically advanced world, children could have smack censors which would register the extent of the hurt.

Smack a little too hard, and there would be a flashing blue light outside of your front door in an instant.

Also, seeing as children are generally better at technology than adults, it wouldn't be long before the sensors were tampered with so that the exasperated adult went to smack their child, only to find that they were inexplicably hitting themselves.

Having arrived at smacking by a light-hearted route, I have to say that there is nothing at all funny about hitting children. Perhaps three times I smacked our three (one apiece, probably) - and each time it felt like an admission of total parental failure.

The vote in the Lords on Monday seems to be a fudge that clears up nothing. Parents will be allowed to hit their children, but not too hard. Is that the best our politicians can come up with? At least we would know where we were with an outright ban.

In a sense you truly know a country by the laws that make the biggest fuss and clatter. That's why we are proud to live in a land that hits children and hunts foxes.

On an individual level, time sorts out these matters.

Misbehaving toddlers have a habit of growing to 6ft 1", which makes a smack redundant.

Updated: 10:58 Thursday, July 08, 2004