Death and addiction.

 So as Bank holiday Monday  dawns clear and with at least a modicum of sunshine, here in darkest south-east London  we are in the grips of an addiction.

 It started a month or so ago at Easter. We made a visit down to Devon to see Richard's parents and his sister and her seven-year-old son were also present for the weekend. They are the culprits. Both mother and son are fully registered addicts.

They gave us the habit, one innocuous Friday evening in an Exmouth crack den looking remarkably like my in-laws lounge. They introduced as to the time wasting, finger swiping, money spending, and ultimately frustrating pastime that is, Candy Crush Saga.

It's an insidious little game of making sweets fall and break in a certain order in order to gain points, clear the jelly, and let the ingredients fall. That may not make sense but then neither really does the game. There is no point to it other than you win a level and then you go on to the next level. No ultimate goal, the makers just keep spewing out more levels than we can keep up with.

It's available on iPad, iPhone and on Facebook, so when you run out of lives on one device you can switch to another to carry on. And of course if you're desperate to finish a level, you can always buy help! The addiction is spreading. Forty or so of my Facebook friends are playing, and my notifications in Facebook mainly consist of the words "So and So has sent you a request". It's another addict begging for help. You can send lives to friends. I know what you're up to  - Mark, George, David and others. We can sit at home on the sofa watching TV, iPads poised, waiting for our levels to recharge, forgetting to converse with each other, just to get our virtual sugar sweets to fall.

 My addiction doesn't surprise me. I think I'm a person with an addictive personality. One of the greatest triumphs in my life was giving up drinking 14 years ago next month. I don't think I became an alcoholic, but I was well on the way and certainly I was addicted. Although I used to pride myself on having one or two days a week alcohol free, when I started drinking I couldn't stop. I had to have a glass in my hand. The technical term for that evidently is a dipsomaniac. Someone who has to have a drink. What I have since found out is that the drink doesn't have to be alcoholic, so technically I'm still a dipsomaniac, but these days it's with a glass of tonic and whatever fruit juice I choose to mix it with. And the cure took only will power, so I know the answer is in me. Just put the i pad down Paul!

Richard has been allowed a temporary respite from his Candy Crush saga addiction, as he's working his way through the proof copy of my book. "So You Want To Be A Corporate Actor?" will be published by Nick Hern books on 18 July, and seeing it laid out in typeset form makes me feel incredibly proud of the achievement of having written it. That makes me feel it might be achievable to write another - that crime novel that I've always wanted to write. Ideas are brimming around in my mind. Ingenious ways of man inflicting murder and mayhem on man. Perhaps one of my hitherto be realised characters could become addicted to a small computer game, and somebody else could bash them over the head with an iPad as a result.  I think it might be a little easy to find out who the culprit was, and I probably should investigate more ingenious methods.

As Agatha Christie was prone to point out "Murder is easy!". It's hiding it that is the problem.