It’s not a big water slide but, when you’re two-years old, even the staircase to your bedroom’s an Everest.

The best thing about this slide, for bigger kids at least, is that there’s a large black and red digital clock suspended above the exit hole.

As you whizz into daylight, all flailing arms and white wash, you can check to see a readout of your maximum speed coming down, and how it compares to the day’s top score.

This simple addition to the ride makes all the difference. Suddenly how you slide is as important as why you slide. Lock arms to sides and lie your head hard against the tube, staring upwards as the ceiling flicks by? Or arch your back so there’s as little flesh friction as possible? Perhaps only wear Speedos? Technique becomes everything where before it meant nothing. And when you emerge: if you’ve tipped over 13 mph you’re doing very well. Yeah, it’s not a big water slide.

More of life should have statistical read-outs and high-score tables built into it. Libraries with a leaderboard showing who’s read the most books this month; cats with GPRS trackers to show WHERE they went and WHAT they did last night; urinals that let you know who peed the longest that night; cinema screen reports on who ate the most popcorn during the picture; office jobs with achievement points.

Anyway, Chewing Pixels is waist deep in water, cajoling its daughter – she’s the two year old gazing upwards in fear as the camera zooms directly up into the rafters – to go down the water slide. The rules on the board state: ‘Children must be two-years or over to ride this flume’ so it seemed as good a first time as any to get get her name to the top of a leaderboard. Perhaps videogame journalists make the most pushy parents when it comes to this kind of thing. Would now be a good time to admit we took into consideration what her three initials would look like on an arcade leaderboard when naming her?

So we’re there, in the pool gazing upwards at this winding blue tube with a huddle of be-goggled kids at the summit, and I’m reasoning with her. Well, as much as one can reason with the two-year-old mind. ‘It’s perfectly safe’; ‘It’ll be fun’; ‘I’ll hold your hand on the way up’; ‘You can watch me go down it first’; ‘I’ll be there to catch you at the bottom’: all the angles covered.

And one second she’s nodding feverishly in expectation and semi-understanding. The next, having seen the symphony of splash one of the boys just made at the bottom of the slide, she’s shaking her head, bottom lip trembling, eyes full of deep worry. Things she doesn’t understand about things she doesn’t understand and only me there to say what, why and that it’ll definitely be OK in the end.

Then she makes a snap decision, dashing out of the pool as fast as her legs can go.

And as she’s running towards the corkscrew staircase that leads up to the slide, she’s crying. In fact, she’s near hysterical. But she’s still running, and towards, not away from her fear.

It’s the clearest outward demonstration of that complex tussle of human emotions I’ve ever seen: running towards the thing that’s making you cry; compelled to do something terrifying because it’ll be fun, because it’ll be important, because that’s what other people expect, because that’s how you grow up.

I’m not sure if I’m more proud of her or ashamed of myself. And then I realise, twenty days late, in her example I’ve found my New Year’s resolution.