Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
Unless you are spending the summer on a different planet, you will have heard of this year’s summer craze - Pokémon Go.
Love it or loathe it, Pokémon has been resurrected and is taking the real and virtual worlds by storm, adding a staggering £6bn to the market value of Nintendo overnight and I’m thinking it’s maybe time to switch our investments!
Two of our teenagers have been caught by the Pokémon bug, even downloading it somehow before the official UK release. We happened to be on a tour of UK universities with long drives between cities when our teens invited Pokémon to join us!
Suddenly, there were no more groans and they had stopped asking ‘are we there yet?’ They now jumped out from the car with a newly-found enthusiasm unlike I’d seen before.
Having spent years encouraging our brood to visit monuments, museums and places of historic interest amidst a barrage of ‘must we, it’s boring!’ protests. I was now being asked by them if they could visit every site of interest in search of PokéStops.
Pokémon can only be captured on foot, I’m delighted to hear. This must be the first summer where I don’t have to encourage our children to go outside and get some fresh air and exercise.
Our daughter awoke the other morning and announced she was heading out for a 10k walk to release an egg, her brother piped up: “I’ll come too!”
Meanwhile, I poured myself another cup of coffee and settled down to read the newspaper in peace.
Thank you Nintendo!
