I realise this may sound very odd, so please bear with me. Last year, we installed a pond in our back garden. While it's all lovely and full of fish and weeds and aquatic snails, we don't have any frogs.

I really like frogs, so to rectify this, I went to my mother's house and took some frog spawn from her (much larger) pond, with the intention of putting it in mine and starting a lovely colony of frogs in my back garden. The only trouble is this: fish love to eat frog spawn.

This is why I decided to keep the spawn in my bath (more accurately, a leaky fish tank in my bath) until they're big enough to scare the fish away.

Now I've got a bathroom teeming with tadpoles, and they're absolutely fascinating to watch – it's like being a ten year old kid again. Once they're a little bigger (I may wait until their front legs have grown), I'll put them out in the pond to fend for themselves. Until then, they've got plenty of weed and plankton type stuff to eat.

{I should note here in passing that there's a separate shower cubicle in our house. Just wanted to point that out.}

This leads me neatly on to Will (Sim City) Wright's forthcoming opus Spore. I've been really looking forward to this game, partially because I love the whole 'sim-everything' concept, partially because I hope that Mr. Wright will atone for The Sims, which I personally found utterly appalling - I found its falsely jovial, materialistic dolls house gameplay shallow and its emphasis on 'popularity' particularly odious.

His earlier Sim City on the other hand, was fantastic, and I'm sincerely hoping that Spore will be more like the latter than the former.

Sadly, early screenshots of Spore are a little disappointing, at least to me; it looks like the biblical book of Genesis reimagined by Pixar.

Still, you can't judge a game by its screenshot, and I hope that my initial reaction is wrong - it's just beginning to look as though Wright's 'Sim Evolution' concept is going to be dumbed down to appeal to the widest possible audience at the expense of depth, which is a shame.

Until it's released, I'll have to withhold judgement - and tend to my army of tadpoles, which for now, are infinitely more interesting than Spore...