A couple of years ago, when Lisa first started schmoozing the local Catholics in the hope of getting Amelie into a decent school, she asked the priest if it's wrong to lie to your children. Fortunately he's a forward-thinking man of the world, and he said no. So we started telling Amelie about Jesus. She now talks to him on a regular basis, whilst kneeling at the side of her bed in the hope of staying up a bit later. Although I think her actions owe more to this episode of The Simpsons than any Biblical teaching...


Unfortunately, as time goes on, it's getting harder and harder to lie to Amelie. Not because we don't want to, but because she can see through us like the gap above the windowsill where the net curtain used to be. Whilst at Peppa Pig World a couple of months ago, I shouted "Look, Amelie! It's Peppa Pig!", to which she responded "No, Daddy, it's someone dressed as Peppa Pig", so she's nobody’s fool. Apart from Toby's, in a medieval sense.

Yesterday teatime, however, her suspicious perception reached new heights with the arrival of her evening meal. Lisa had lovingly defrosted some home-made lasagne, which Amelie used to love, but which she's gone off since Lisa cooked it and stuck it in the freezer. She now wrinkles her nose at the mere mention of the word, and refuses to even try it.

But as luck would have it, she's still a big fan of 'I Can Cook' on Cbeebies, hosted by the lovely (and currently pregnant) Katy Ashworth, who's a bit like Delia, only less inclined to get drunk at a football match. As far as I know. Amelie enjoys logging on to the Cbeebies website, printing out her recipes without permission, and then badgering me to make them, so having heated up Lisa's lasagne in the microwave, I chopped it up to make it less identifiable (which isn't usually a problem with Lisa's cooking), and then presented it to Amelie as 'Katy's Pasta Bake'.

She didn't even try it. Heck, she didn't even look at it. I placed it on the table with a flourish, told her what it was, and without so much as a glance towards her food, Amelie looked up at me from the sofa with an expression of total disdain, and said:

"Daddy. I know that isn't Katy's Pasta Bake. You didn't even print out the recipe. You're just pretending you did so I'll eat it".

In the end, she had beans on toast.