Right, Amelie's out of the bath and slowly drying in a warm towel (if only I could say the same for my shirt sleeves), so without further ado...

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!

I can't reveal how old she is for legal reasons, but when she was Amelie's age, the closest thing they had to infant formula was powdered egg, and the sound of doodlebugs still reminds her of the womb.

To celebrate her Grandma's birthday, Amelie went to the local Mother & Baby group this morning to be weighed. She's now 11lb 9oz, which means she's only put on seven ounces in the past two weeks. She could learn a thing or two from her Dad. I might start feeding her mince pies. I'd give her a slice of yule log, but frankly that was finished by this time yesterday. And I'm not even sure Lisa had any.

I need to keep my strength up though. The wards at the hospital have started ordering twice as much stuff to keep the patients drugged up over Christmas, meaning we have twice as much work to do. Add to that the fact that Wednesday is always our busiest day, the stores supervisor is on holiday, one of my colleagues was at the dentist, and our manager was in Haywards Heath for the afternoon, and what do you get..?

You get the one day of the year when you really don't want the walk-in fridge to break down. But still, there's a certain frisson of excitement to be had when the engineer who's been tinkering with your compressor for the past four hours, turns to you and says "It's clapped out. There's nothing I can do", and promptly leaves. When I say frisson of excitement, I suppose I mean moment of panic.

But hey, when the work's piling up and you've got a million things to do, what better way to spend an afternoon than evacuating a fridge the size of my living room, and driving half a million pounds worth of cancer drugs to the nearest hospital with a cold store, before the whole lot starts to curdle. One traffic jam and the NHS would have been on its knees. Much like me, begging for my job back.

Mind you, it could have been worse. A fortnight ago that fridge contained all the food for our Christmas party. I'm willing to write off a few crates of Herceptin, but if we'd lost the mini cheesecakes there'd have been trouble.