I've just bumped into David Van Day in St James's Street. I was coming out of the Age Concern shop, and he was walking up towards Kemptown looking portly in a summery shirt. Frankly he was less Age Concern and more Sausage Concern. I realise I'm in no position to judge, but the man's clearly put on weight since he left the jungle. It must be all those showbiz lunches with Timmy Mallett. If he carries on like that, I'll be seeing him as a patient before the end of the year.

And on that subject, I've just completed my first entirely unsupervised week in the new job. The diabetics of Brighton have been placed into my care without the luxury of a witness when things go wrong. So from now on, any attempts to sue me for poking them in the eye with a tropicamide dropper are likely to be unsuccessful.

To be honest, although I've only officially been running my own clinics since Monday, I've pretty much been working alone for the past three weeks. The various screeners who have accompanied me across Sussex have been great believers in the sink or swim approach, and felt that the best way for me to learn is to let me get on with it while they sit in another room eating biscuits. As a result, I've been well prepared for my first week of independence, and have swum a lot more than I've sunk. Although I could have done with a snorkel on Monday.

In other news, I had a phone call yesterday afternoon from some guy at Full House magazine to let me know that they've finally cobbled together an article about Chloe. Bearing in mind that she sold them her story back in February (and we still haven't seen the cheque), it's taken them a while to compose those three hundred words. But I think it's worth waiting for. I took a break from grading some retinal images so that the chap could read it to me over the phone, and frankly I've never heard anything like it. It's like a shower scene from a Barbara Cartland novel. And they've made it sound like I wrote it myself, which is worrying. Anyway, it'll be in issue 33, which apparently hits the news stands in a couple of weeks. And the recycling bins the day after.