The nominees for this year's Hospital Star Awards were announced on Monday, and inexplicably I've failed to get a nod in either the 'Mentor of the Year' category or the 'Outstanding Leadership Award', both of which I thought were virtual shoo-ins. In fact I've failed to get any nominations at all. So it's a good job I'm only in it for the money.

Happily, however, some people we know have been nominated. After a year of spending their danger money on stress therapists and pills for their nerves, the staff of the 'Owls' Pre-School Room at Amelie's nursery have been recognised for their hard work in looking after our daughter. They've been nominated as the 2013 Team of the Year. And I'm pleased to say that Lisa can take all the credit for that. Although she deserves virtually none of it.

A few weeks ago, I put in a nomination for someone else (I couldn't possibly reveal who), and as a result, Lisa suggested that maybe we should nominate the ladies at the nursery. The admin side of the business sometimes feels like it's being run by the children, but the actual childcare is excellent, and we're big fans of the four young ladies who take charge of our big bundle of trouble.

So three weeks ago I spent an entire lunch break at Horsham Hospital producing a finely crafted 400-word essay extolling the virtues of the pre-school staff, and making them sound like a cross between Supernanny and the staff at Eton College. I then e-mailed it to Lisa, and she told me to submit it. Under her name.

Naturally I always do as I'm told, and I didn't want the organisers of the awards thinking that I'm responsible for all the nominations, so I filled in the form myself, added my own essay, and put Lisa's name at the top. I was basically taking on the role of a Secret Millionaire with no money, so I was quite happy to go along with it at the time. But that was before Lisa began being lauded as the new Warren Buffett, and taking all the glory for herself.

She had to e-mail the nursery about something a few days later, and casually added a line at the end saying that she'd nominated the Owls team for a Hospital Star Award. Within forty-five minutes, the nursery manager had e-mailed back to say how wonderful that was, how grateful they are, and how much it means to them, and by the following day the staff had been informed. As a result, the arrival of Lisa at the nursery is now treated like the second coming of Christ. For the past two weeks, she's been welcomed there like Bill Gates with a blank chequebook, and is routinely ushered towards the pre-school room on a metaphorical red carpet lined with curtseying staff members applauding her unbounded generosity.

So naturally she hasn't told them it was all her husband's own work.

And in the meantime, the plaudits keep coming. The quarterly nursery newsletter came out last week, but now that the award nominations have been made public, the manager handed out an extra sheet of additional news yesterday, which said this...


That line is the one Lisa crossed by taking all the credit. But still, it makes me glad I gave up my lunch break three weeks ago. Although clearly my wife's the one who'll end up with a plaque on the nursery wall.