LET me tell you about Saturday. It started lazily enough, because the bit until 8am was spent in bed. After the indulgence of that long lie-in, it was time for the rest of the day.

First on the list was getting the eight-year-old to football and the seven-year-old to dance.

By good fortune, these tasks fell to my wife and a friend, leaving me with minutes to fritter away looking at the headlines on the weekend newspaper.

After that, it was in the car with the 12-year-old whose music lessons have been thoughtfully moved from Queen Anne School to York College, which is only three or four traffic jams away, but driving through York is a well recognised form of relaxation, and anyway once I'm there, there is the journey back to enjoy, and after that a whole minute to waste in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water.

Then it's into York on foot to pick up the seven-year-old dance star, who looks very fetching as she prances with all the other girls - as too do I, wandering home with a Smarties back-pack in hand, leaving the seven-year-old free to talk the hind legs off any passing donkeys, though as passing donkeys are in short supply, my own legs have to do.

At home, I bundle the seven-year-old in the car and zoom off to pick her brother up from football, where there is time to admire his clever labour-saving device of keeping his new trainers on instead of going to the bother of getting his football boots all muddy.

The eight-year-old and his friend fight all the way home, but boys will be boys and why else do old Volvos have back seats the size of wrestling rings?

At home there is time to prepare lunch. Whole minutes are wasted sitting down to eat, then, washing up done, there is time to worry about the return of the prodigal saxophone player, who is meant to be home before I take the eight-year-old and his friend (a different one this time) to Knavesmire for the Cub cross-country run.

But everything works out, my wife returns too, and I'm soon back in the car, discovering that the traffic jams are even more relaxing second time round.

It is surprising how long it can take to watch a cross-country run, and two o'clock soon becomes five, and then it's back in the car to enjoy a different bout of back-seat fighting in the same traffic jam.

A few minutes after arriving home, I head off again, this time on foot and alone for a four-mile run round York, taking in lungfuls of invigorating pollution, happily supplemented by the smoke from the fire at Foxton's garage.

ALL this talk of genetic screening to produce test-tube babies raises understandable fears of "designer babies". The latest such baby, born to an American couple, was screened to produce exactly the right cells for him to act as a donor to his seriously-ill older sister.

Such cases are obviously serious and deserve to be treated individually.

But what I would like to ask is this: do you think it's possible to have a child genetically screened so that they don't grow up to soak every surface of the bathroom when they have a shower?

While we are about it, there would be many takers for having children in whom the Game Boy gene had been extracted.

Other possible traits for capture in the genetic sieve would be the Losing The TV Handset gene, the Shoes In The Middle Of The Floor gene, and the It Wasn't Me gene.

The Annoying Your Little Sister gene could go too, while little sisters could lose the Getting Wound Up By Big Brothers gene.

And further down the line, fathers could have the Writing Embarrassing Columns gene eliminated.