Blood-spewing episodes aside, there's been a lot of sickness in the Gardner household over the past couple of days. Chloe spent most of Tuesday and Wednesday throwing up all over the carpet, and by yesterday I was fearful that Amelie's days of lying on the sofa, watching Cbeebies and sucking her thumb with a cat under her arm, could be coming to an end.


But oddly, Chloe seems to have perked up a bit today. Which is more than can be said for the rest of us. I spent yesterday doing a clinic in Haywards Heath while the reception staff went down with the lurgi one by one. By lunchtime they'd all gone home sick.

Despite the lack of face masks, I made it through the day apparently unscathed, only to arrive in the office this morning and have a conversation at the water cooler with one of my colleagues about how rough she felt. Half an hour later, she'd gone home too.

It was soon afterwards that I started feeling queasy myself. At the time I put it down as some kind of psychosomatic reaction, but having felt mildly nauseous all morning, I popped home at lunchtime to get some sympathy escort Amelie to nursery, only to find that Lisa had been throwing up all day. She assumed it was pregnancy, I thought I was suffering from paranoia, but in reality we might both be ill.

Lisa certainly wasn't feeling herself. I told her at lunchtime that I'd booked a couple of weeks annual leave for August, and she replied, in complete seriousness, "Is that for the Jubilee?". I had to remind her that we're having a baby.

So Lisa took to her bed this afternoon, while I took Amelie to nursery and returned to work. I still don't feel too great, so tomorrow's rota has been changed to make sure I'm not far from a sick bucket. Amelie appears to be fine (I watched her plummeting down the nursery slide from the window of our department), but she told me afterwards that her best friend Mandy "had a sad face all day". I asked her why, and she said "I don't know, I didn't ask her", which shows what a caring little friend she is, before adding "Maybe her Mummy told her she couldn't have any ice cream".

She then asked if we could go to the shops. I think that's what they call emotional blackmail.