Just as the weather turns to snow and ice, I've had to return to the winding country roads of Crawley Down today. In the words of the patient pictured opposite my consulting room, "No..."


Mind you, he's having a red hot poker inserted into his ear, so it's a miracle his language isn't even stronger.

But on the subject of small children who create beautiful pictures, the good news is that Amelie's now learnt to take photos with Lisa's mobile phone. Obviously she's not allowed to, but frankly that's never going to stop her. She's actually learnt a total of three new skills in the past few days: she's taken a photo of her skirt, sent a blank text message to my Mum, and then on Saturday, surfed the internet. We found her sitting under the living room table with Lisa's mobile, trying to enter something into Yahoo search. I wanted to see what she was looking for, but sadly she ran out of credit before we could find out.

So with Lisa needing to raise some cash to top up her mobile, we decided to head over to Hove dog track on Sunday with Lisa's mother. She's surviving on a state pension, whereas I'm living the life of Riley, so I kindly gave her twenty pounds spending money. A decision I regretted when I lost my shirt on the first race and she won £28.50 from a £2 bet. I thought that was jammy until four races later when she bet the same amount again and won fifty-five quid. At which point I asked her to lend me some money.

Fortunately I managed to string together a few minor wins of my own before the end of the afternoon, and we left Hove considerably richer than when we arrived. Or we would have done if we hadn't stopped at Burger King on the way home.

As for yesterday, I took the day off work to go Christmas shopping with Lisa. Her Mum was kind enough to have Amelie (although with her money, she could have hired a nanny), so we made straight for Toys R Us, where we loaded up on seasonal essentials like a plastic Noah's Ark and a musical aeroplane. By the time we left, it was past Amelie's teatime, so Lisa phoned her Mum (on my mobile, for obvious reasons) to check that Amelie wasn't starving. Fortunately she wasn't. She'd been eating chocolate cake all afternoon.

We arrived home at 6:30pm, safe in the knowledge that we'd finally finished our Christmas shopping. At which point we found a card on the doormat telling us that Amazon had tried to deliver the rest of our gifts, found we were out, and taken them all back to the depot. It looks like I might have to give the ark to my brother.