They say a leopard never changes its spots...


But if it's drawn by Amelie, it can certainly have them in a different colour. That's my daughter's current artwork in progress, although I should point out that she didn't draw the outline. Her own attempts at cats look a lot more like this...

... which is impressive, but marginally less life-like. The colouring above, however, is all her own work. Having started with the spots, she informed me proudly that "I'm doing this leopard in the proper colours", before realising that she’d made a terrible error, abandoning that idea, and promptly adding a bit of blue.

The most impressive thing about that picture, however, is not Amelie's ability to colour neatly inside the lines (in the wrong shade), it's the fact that she single-handedly logged on to the CBeebies website, found the drawing of a leopard, then turned on the printer, clicked on 'print', and produced it all on her own. It's a bit like Toby's constant crawling: we're proud that he can do it, but terrified of the power it gives him. I'm now expecting to come home from work one day to find Amelie printing out some porn pictures and a copy of Mein Kampf.

Worse still is that she's discovered where we keep the Blu-tac, and for the past week has been merrily sticking up all her own pictures. The felt-tip's barely dry on the paper, and she's climbing onto the back of the sofa to reach my stationery drawer, pulling out the Blu-tac, and attaching her artwork to a random wall, three feet off the ground. It's like living with Banksy. And it's annoying, because it makes it harder for us to bin them without her noticing.

Anyhoo, on the subject of great artworks, I spent the whole of yesterday evening on the sofa with a laptop, attempting to form my carefully crafted words and pictures into a conference poster which can be eye-catching in more ways than one. Suffice it to say, it didn't go well. My main mistake was to assume that when a poster is 119cm tall and 85cm wide, I can pretty much write what I like without running out of space. That turned out not to be true. By 9pm I was having to cut things out left, right and centre. Not to mention at the top and bottom.

As things stand right now, I basically have two options for successful completion of my case study. Either I rescale all my photos to the size of a postage stamp and provide every conference delegate with a magnifying glass, or I leave out the conclusion and present it as a whodunit. I'm leaning towards the latter.