I CAN report that Arnold Schwarzenegger is once again going to be the The Terminator. However this muscle-bound filmstar is not returning to the silver screen – thankfully he has long-since moved on.

He seems to be revelling – well surviving at any rate – in his role as the governor of California. This free-spirit state has always held a special appeal for me, a view that wasn’t lessened by a visit there last summer.

Yes, yes I know house insurance is stratospheric and you have to rebuild your home every four years because it gets burned to the ground by seasonal wildfires, but it’s a small price to pay to embrace the glorious climate and Bohemian lifestyle.

Anyway Gov Schwarz is championing a seemingly spiffing idea. He wants schools to get rid of text books and use the internet to access information. In principle it’s a brilliant plan. As he points out textbooks quickly fall out of date whereas the web keeps everything up to speed.

However there is a slight flaw in his plan. The kids.

You see bright ideas are fine when they’re worked out on the back of fag packets and transferred in the mind warped by perfection to the world of reality. Clearly the governor’s memory is failing him when it comes to school days.

Perfection and plans just don’t come together in the school environment. There is something akin to the Bermuda triangle in schools when it comes to books, rulers, pencils and the like. They have a habit of mysteriously disappearing.

A class of 30 kids starting out the day armed with electronic gizmos containing all their school work is doomed to utter failure. For a kick off, six of them will have left them at home.

A further three will have left them on a school bus, two more would have forgotten to charge them overnight and the troops are further depleted when others forget to charge their failing machines during the day.

Then a couple more would have lost them in the playground – never to be seen again of course – and at least one would have swapped theirs for a packet of ciggies or some other highly suspicious substance.

And so we arrive at the last lesson of the day with everyone crowded round swot Johnson’s screen who hasn’t left his computer at home, remembered to charge it through the day, hasn’t cracked the screen, hasn’t had it nicked and hasn’t imported a fatal virus while playing World of Warcraft in the English lesson.

One of the gizmos the Gov’s talking about is the electronic book and it was interesting to hear the Luddites on the radio railing against such an invention.

In our humble Hazlemere home we have seven floor to ceiling bookcases, a small one in the bedroom and another small one in the hall. We’re big fans of the books, in case you hadn’t guessed.

I love their tangibility, but when Sony brought out its e-Reader I bought one. It can hold something like a thousand novels and is thinner than a paperback.

The reason was simple. For instance instead of packing away eight or ten books every time I go away on holiday or for a weekend I can just take the Reader.

It will, however, be a long, long time before something like this ever replaces a book – if at all.

The thing with modern technology is to make sure you stay in control. It’s certainly nothing to be frightened of – like the Luddites clearly are – but it is also something to embrace wisely – which Gov Schwarz isn’t doing.

The Terminator is finally going to meet his match on this one!