I think there's some kind of conspiracy going on. On Friday night, Big Sis settled down to write a begging letter to Alan Sugar, only for her laptop to die the death of a thousand crashes. Fortunately she's quite enterprising (you have to be if you want to go on The Apprentice), so she found a bloke on the internet, went round his house and gave him her laptop, before leaving without a receipt. He's not answering his phone now.

But glossing over that, the good news is that Big Sis managed to borrow a friend's computer at the weekend, wrote out her application and e-mailed it to me on Sunday. When we got back from St Leonards, I opened it up, crossed most of it out, and rewrote the first half, before turning off my computer and going to bed.

I got up on Monday morning to find a text message from Sis to say that her work laptop has died now too. How I laughed. Right up until the moment I pressed the power button on my PC and it failed to start. I'm not sure what's going on, but I think it's the ghost of Margaret Mountford trying to scupper Big Sis's chances of selling cheap stereos for a living.

I couldn't attempt to fix the problem yesterday as I was working in Crowborough all day. In Brighton I see patients from nursing homes, in Crowborough they're all from stately homes. One of them was three weeks short of her hundredth birthday, so I think the secret of a long life is money and servants. Sadly I only have one of those.

But I got on well with the nobility of Sussex, which proves I should have been born to a higher station, and returned home tired but satisfied, to spend an enjoyable evening banging my computer with a clenched fist. When that failed to work, I asked Lisa to phone PC World this morning and book it in for repair. She duly did so, and was told they have no available slots for the next week. Unless I want to walk out of a clinic on Friday morning.

But on the subject of walking out of clinics, my last four patients this afternoon all cancelled (it looked a bit like rain), so I escaped the diabetes centre early and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to drive straight across town with my PC under my arm (which makes changing gear difficult), and throw myself on the mercy of the PC World TechGuys.

Well all I can say is appointment schmappointment. Their bookings clerk might have claimed they were busy till August, but they could see the look of desperation in my eyes, and agreed to look at it there and then. The chap not only managed to identify the problem (a faulty memory chip), but agreed to replace it with a new one and said he'd charge me for a simple memory upgrade, rather than a full repair. It saved me forty quid on the price I'd have been charged if I'd had an appointment. Sometimes it pays to break the rules. I should put that on Sis's application.