Mulled Whines

2012-01-28T16:39:00.000Z

Unsurprisingly, Lisa's been sick to her stomach since she found out she was pregnant. And not just with nerves. She's also been lethargic to the point of coma, and has even gone off crisps. But as it happens, she's not the only member of the family who's been feeling poorly just lately. Amelie's had a cough this week, which kept her awake most of Wednesday night, and meant that two minutes after getting home from nursery on Thursday, she looked like this...

That's nothing, however, compared to how Chloe's been feeling this week. Brighton's most famous cat stopped eating on Monday, started hiding away on Tuesday, and when she still couldn't be tempted by her favourite food on Wednesday, we phoned the vet and booked her in for Thursday afternoon. So having checked on the health of our baby at the hospital, I headed straight home, picked up Chloe, and drove her to the vet.

Having checked her over, the nice lady vet asked me to leave her there so that they could do some blood tests, and when I returned after work, she told me that Chloe has kidney failure and an infection. Despite being the cat equivalent of Methuselah, the vet felt that Chloe's like a feline Joan Collins and well preserved for her age, so although she's in her twilight years, treatment was probably worth it. The vet wanted her to stay in for twenty-four hours and be treated intravenously.

Chloe's not insured, and with a new baby on the way, cost is a major issue for us at the moment, so I told the vet that before agreeing to go ahead, I needed to know roughly what the cost would be. She said "about a hundred pounds". So I gulped, and agreed. Particularly as the vet was supremely confident that the treatment would be effective, return Chloe to her normal self in a day or two, and give her perhaps another year or so of life.

I was expecting to pick her up after work yesterday, but one of the veterinary nurses phoned me at lunchtime on Friday and said that although Chloe was responding well to treatment, they thought it would do her good to stay another night and have a blood test this morning. As the nurse put it, "You've already paid for the intravenous drip, so we might as well keep her on it, just to make sure she's completely fine". I casually agreed, and called my next patient.

I phoned the practice again this morning and was told that Chloe was still having tests, but I was contacted an hour later by a different vet, with a very different attitude. Having been cheerfully told by everyone up until that point that things were great, this vet sounded ominously pessimistic. Chloe hadn't responded to the intravenous drugs anywhere near as well as I'd been led to believe, and her blood tests still weren't within normal levels. But he said they'd send her home with some tablets and see how she goes. He then said that she may go downhill in the next few days, and reach the end of the road.

I got to the vet's fifteen minutes later, introduced myself to the receptionist, and was handed a bill for £398.67. I spent the next forty-five minutes 'discussing' it with a nurse. Apparently there had been a "miscommunication". The original vet (who conveniently wasn't there) should never have told me it would be a hundred pounds. The first blood tests alone were over ninety. The quick one this morning was seventy-two. Apparently by the time I'd agreed to let Chloe stay in on Thursday night, I'd already accrued a bill of almost £200. And that was despite me telling the vet that we don't have a lot of money and can't afford much more than a hundred. If I'd known it would be four hundred, I'd have told them on Thursday not to go ahead.

And I told them that this morning. About five times. But apparently "there's nothing we can do". The nurse apologised on behalf of the vet for giving me misleading information, and then said "I don't mean to be rude, but I think we're all so used to the NHS that you forget how much treatment like this costs". Quite honestly, I could have punched her. I'm well aware how much veterinary treatment costs, which is why I asked them for a price up front. They just chose to ignore it.

The nurse did agree to check the vet's notes to see if she'd mentioned the cost of £100, but needless to say, she hadn't. So it was my word against theirs. And I lost. To the tune of £400. Next month's credit card bill's going to be interesting.

I wouldn't mind so much if my £400 had delivered me a healthy cat, but having been told on Thursday that I could have Chloe back to full health within 24 hours for £100, I'm now four hundred down, and sitting here with a sad, weak cat who will barely eat, and may need to be put down within a few days. Frankly they're lucky I'm not currently rampaging across Brighton like Michael Douglas in 'Falling Down'.

But still, anger is a great incentive to productivity. I've written this blog post in about twenty minutes flat. If I could do this every day, NaNoWriMo would be a breeze.

2012-01-27T18:22:00.000Z

This is my 2,500th blog post!

And this is my second baby...

Although it looks more like a weather front sweeping in from the Atlantic. Frankly I've seen clearer photos of the Loch Ness Monster, so you'll have to take my word for it.

But photographic evidence notwithstanding, the good news is that eight months after spending £500 on a DuoFertility gadget, we're definitely not getting our money back. As of today, Lisa is 13 weeks and 5 days pregnant. Which is a shock, as we thought she was only 12 weeks gone. That'll teach me to trust her with a calendar.

We've known about Lisa's status as a mother-to-be for the past eight weeks, but after two miscarriages and a lot of dashed hopes, we've been too nervous to tell anyone. On top of that, Amelie's dead set against the idea of a sibling, so we're avoiding baby talk for fear of a tantrum. The way she's coming across at the moment, she'll be there at the birth, trying to shove it back in.

It's less than a year since a top consultant looked at our test results, made a face, and advised us to spend four thousand pounds on IVF, and there have been times since when I've wondered if we were right not to. Although checking my bank statements usually convinces me that we were. As it transpires, £500 on DuoFertility was a much better investment. Especially as I got the money off my parents.

When she was pregnant with Amelie, Lisa had to go all the way to London for a nuchal scan, but fortunately they now do them about two hundred yards from our flat. So we popped in yesterday afternoon, fully braced for the worst. As it turned out, the only bad news was the quality of the photos. Amelie's nuchal scan looked like this, which compares quite favourably to the new baby's portrait...

That one's less Leonardo da Vinci, and more Pablo Picasso. It's also upside down, because the baby insisted on lounging around on its front like a beached penguin.

The important thing though, is that everything else appears normal. Not only is the baby older than everyone thought (much like its mother), but it has two arms, two legs, and a brain the size of a planet. Albeit a very small planet. We don't yet have the results of the accompanying blood test, but it appears there's no reason to worry.

On the downside, the baby's due on July 29th, which just happens to be my birthday. So I'm concerned that Lisa won't be able to get out to buy me a present. I've told her to order something online, and if necessary, I'll stay in to receive it while she pops down to the labour ward.

I'd also like to apologise to those people who have invited us to summer parties in late July or early August, and received cagey answers over the past few weeks, with no explanantion as to why we can't make it. I hope our reluctance makes a bit more sense now. Well, Lisa's reluctance. Personally I'm just not very sociable.

So that's the good news. Unfortunately the scanning of our second child wasn't the only thing going on around here yesterday. The rest of the saga will have to wait until tomorrow...

2012-01-25T19:01:00.003Z

There are times in my life when I feel convinced that Amelie is actually a middle-aged self-help guru trapped in the body of a three-year-old girl. I was sitting at the table eating my tea last night, when she looked up from her position on the sofa, and - out of the blue, and with no preamble whatsoever – began the following conversation:

"Daddy..?"

"Yes, Ammy Am?"

"Don't let me down."

"I won't, darling."

"And don't let Mummy down either."

"I won't."

"And Daddy?"

"Yes?"

"Don't let yourself down."

I think I've just been put in my place by a toddler. Either she's had a serious talking to at nursery, or she's been listening to one of Lisa's rants about absent fathers again. Either way, she's given me something to think about.

2012-01-24T18:55:00.000Z

The postman delivered a letter to us this morning addressed to Lisa's Mum, which is odd as she hasn't lived here for two years, and didn't get much post when she did. Odder still is that it was posted in Malaga, Spain, which is virtually another planet as far as my mother-in-law's concerned. She's never been "over the water", as she so quaintly puts it, and considers the Isle of Wight to be foreign soil.

So on the grounds that it might be something dodgy, I suggested to Lisa that we open it. And boy, am I glad we did. It turns out she's won the lottery!

The letter comes all the way from the International Lotto Commission in Madrid, who are clearly saving a lot of money on ink for their dot matrix printer, and ploughing it all back into the prize fund, because whilst their letterhead has clearly seen better days, their generosity knows no bounds. They're writing to inform Lisa's mother that despite never having been to Spain, bought a ticket, or heard of their international sweepstake programme, she's somehow managed to win €815,950 in the latest draw. Her luck really is in.

Obviously under such circumstances, you'd expect there to be a cheque attached to the letter, but the Intl Lotto Commission must have done their homework and discovered that Lisa's Mum doesn’t have a bank account, because they haven't bothered. Instead, they're asking her to contact them for "processing and remittance of your prize money to a designated address of your choice". Presumably they'll stuff it through her letterbox in used fivers.

Anyway, it's all very exciting, and couldn't have come at a better time. It's her birthday on Saturday, so if she gets hold of her winnings by then, she can pay me back for the photo book.

2012-01-23T19:08:00.000Z

After a day of gift-giving and receiving (the receiving being entirely on our side), we had high hopes of more presents yesterday, with the arrival of our old friend Marie from the depths of darkest Croydon. We haven't seen her since the riots in the summer, so at the very least I was expecting some basmati rice and a stereo.

Sadly however, she texted me on Saturday, resigning from her position in my cabinet of friends, in order to spend more time with her sofa. Her employers keep sending her across Europe like one of Hannibal's elephants, and she needed a rest day at home. So we've rescheduled for mid-February. The only thing likely to ruin those plans is if she gets invited out for Valentine's Day. So I'm confident we'll be seeing her.

The change of plan meant two things: firstly that I could eat the massive pizza we'd bought Marie for Sunday lunch, and secondly that we could have a rest day of our own...

Amelie could barely be more relaxed. Not only does she get to lie down, but she has two people to push her.

So with some unexpected free time on our hands, we dropped in on Lisa's Mum yesterday afternoon, before heading over to Queens Park for some fun in the sun. If you can't afford a gym membership, I can highly recommend pushing Amelie on a swing for half an hour. Not only does it give your biceps a thorough workout, but she acts as your personal trainer by shouting at you every time you start to flag.

In addition to building muscle on the swings, I also achieved a full cardiovascular workout by running rings around the world's heaviest roundabout, pushing Amelie and two other kids in circles for ten minutes. In the end, I had to be physically restrained by Lisa, who was concerned that I was about to collapse with a heart attack and didn't want my death to traumatise any small children.

So we headed instead to the tranquil setting of the nearby lake for a game of 'Name That Film'...

That's Amelie doing Forrest Gump...

She just needs to look the other way and put Lisa's handbag on the ground.

2012-01-21T19:44:00.004Z

I say, I say, I say... what do you call a man with a duck's kidney and a chicken's foot?

Fowl. I was looking both ways for a sick bucket.

We had our good friends Stefan, Andrew and Nora around for the afternoon yesterday, and having spent years listening to me say I'll eat pretty much anything, they've finally put me to the test. And found me wanting. We haven't seen Stefan and Andrew since they returned from a two-week holiday in Hong Kong last November, so they've been saving up the gifts for me ever since. I'm now the proud owner of some of the finest shrink-wrapped bird offal this side of Taiwan.

To be honest, it was like Christmas here yesterday, because in addition to some choice cuts of game, they brought Amelie so many presents, she thought they'd run over Santa on the way here. The biggest hit was a foldable wooden tray...

She's wanted one since she tried out Andrew's in October, and it means she can now fulfil her dream of becoming a consummate couch potato by drawing, playing and eating, all without leaving the sofa. In the picture above, she's trying out the farmyard stencils and puzzle books she also received yesterday, whilst wearing a cardboard hat she was given by Nora.

The hat is part of a set called 'Snap Happy', which provides you with various dressing-up supplies such as hats, wigs and glasses, plus a frame to pose in for photos. It's hard to describe unless you have a willing model. And as luck would have it...

That's Andrew with his face on. I think the lips were modelled on Amelie...

As if the internal organs of a range of poultry weren't enough, Lisa and Amelie also received souvenirs from Hong Kong. Amelie is now the proud owner of a pink umbrella, while Lisa received a beautiful Chinese fan. So they're pretty much set for any weather conditions. The fan's made of sandalwood, which is presumably what they make clogs out of. It smells gorgeous anyway, and not like any sandal I've ever sniffed.

Sadly, Nora had to leave early to pick up her daughter from Africa, but the rest of us settled down to plough through the 500+ holiday photos I'd asked Stefan and Andrew to bring on their laptop. Nora thought I was mad, which possibly explains her early exit, but personally I enjoyed it. All three hours of it.

The holiday snaps ranged from pictures of pandas, crocodiles and dolphins, to photos from cable cars, skyscrapers and mountains, including shots of a giant buddha, ancient temple, modern casino and doggy toilet. They also showed us views of the Thai restaurant where their meal was interrupted by a cockroach walking across the table.

But the highlight for me was the photo of an elderly Chinese woman on the underground, who was sitting next to Stefan with a live fish flapping about in her bag. I'm not sure which was more amusing - the sight of a old lady nonchalantly returning from market with a fish that refuses to die, or the look on Stefan's face.

The only moment to compare with that was when they showed us a photo of a sealion at Ocean Park. I was keen to showcase Amelie's vast zoological knowledge, so I pointed at the picture and said to her "What's that?".

Amelie looked at it long and hard, before answering: "Nora".

It's no wonder she left early.

2012-01-21T14:15:00.004Z

Providing financial support to the terminally ill is all very well, but sometimes you have to adopt a more hands-on approach in an effort to help the sick and dying. So I personally answered an SOS call yesterday afternoon.

Fortunately, it wasn't so much a medical emergency, as an invitation to attend a meeting of the Southern Ophthalmological Society, but there were a lot of distress flares on display. And corduroy jackets. With elbow pads.

Well, ok, there weren't. To be honest, I think modern ophthalmologists have better dress sense than I do. I was the only one there in a cardigan. Luckily for me though, there was an outstanding Tan on full view in the front row, which deflected attention from my clothes.

Anyhoo, it was an interesting afternoon, not least when they discussed the case of a man who underwent treatment for a corneal ulcer which resulted in his tongue turning black. It was eventually discovered to be nothing to do with his eye surgery, and purely a side-effect of taking ciprofloxacin. Which is worrying, because I've been on that twice. Once when conducting biological warfare with a learner, and then two years later, after a stranger fondled my privates. I'm glad he didn't give me a black tongue too.

The other highlight for me was the presentation of a recent ophthalmic investigation which resulted in three stated conclusions, the third of which was: "Being without Wikipedia for 24 hours is quite debilitating". I felt the same on Wednesday. Frankly it was a nightmare. I had to ask Lisa who sang 'D.I.V.O.R.C.E.'.

2012-01-19T21:28:00.002Z

I sprung Amelie out of nursery again yesterday afternoon, and I'm pleased to report that having done it for a second time, I'm now well in with the staff, and marginally less likely to be arrested for child abduction. Sadly, however, that has very little to do with my trustworthy face and impeccable credentials, and is more down to a glowing reference from my daughter.

Having been eyed suspiciously at the door by another parent, who refused to enter the code while I was standing there, I eventually made it into the pre-school room, where Amelie was busy amassing a collection of plastic farm animals on the mat. She was quite engrossed in a bit of cow/horse cross-species husbandry, but having clocked me by the door, she quickly stood up, trotted over, and said "Daddy! I've missed you so much!".

The moment I heard that collective "Aaaaaahhhh..." from the nearby members of staff, I knew I had it made. She's done wonders for my reputation.

So as a reward for all her PR work, I decided to visit an exclusive boutique today to get Amelie a present. Yes, that's right, I've been to the St Catherine's Hospice shop in Crawley. Obviously I help people all over the Weald with my purchases from hospice shops, but it's important that my charity work doesn't begin and end with marriage guidance. So in an effort to support those poor souls unlucky enough to end their days in Crawley, I bought Amelie an electric guitar for £3...

She's definitely got a Stevie Wonder head-sway going on at the end there. Give it a couple of years, and we'll have her blacking up for 'Stars in Their Eyes'.

2012-01-18T18:05:00.007Z

I drove up to Crowborough yesterday to visit the 'Hospice in the Weald' charity shop. Admittedly I had to do a clinic at the hospital while I was there, but that was a minor inconvenience. As charity shops go, it's always been one of my favourites, and has achieved Weald-wide fame as the place to go for quality films and cheap laptops.

I'm not sure I've ever been inside without buying something, and yesterday was no exception. I picked this up for a song...

The song being 'D.I.V.O.R.C.E.' by Dolly Parton.

Obviously there's very little a book like that can teach me, but I thought I'd buy it for Lisa, so she can see where she's been going wrong. Especially after she had the nerve to give me a 'D' in the Relate Heart-to-Heart test.

It's written by Dr Steven Simring and his ball & chain (I bet their relationship's simring hot), who are apparently "America's foremost husband-and-wife marriage-counseling team", so with a bit of luck, it should help us make it to our second anniversary. Although if not, there's a chapter on remarriage.

In addition to 'Making Marriage Work for Dummies' (which is much harder than for normal people), the Hospice in the Weald also had a copy of 'Rekindling Romance for Dummies'. I flicked through it, but decided against buying that one. It seemed to be all about taking your wife away for weekends, and frankly I'm too knackered. So I stuck with the book above.

Interestingly, however, having arrived home with my purchase, given it to Lisa, and narrowly avoided being hit around the head with it, I noticed a piece of paper stuck between the pages. It turned out to be the Amazon receipt for both books, dated 18th November 2002. The addresses at the top appeared to explain the reason for purchase...

It can't be easy making your marriage work when one of you is living in Japan.

As it transpired, however, that wasn't the case at all. Reading further down, I found a personal message from the buyer...

So John came across two books about saving your marriage, and decided to give them to Malc and Joelle for Christmas. It makes Madge seem positively friendly.

Fortunately, the world is a wonderful place. One day, you're buying a marriage guidance book in Crowborough; the next day, you're entering a stranger's name into Google. It turns out that John has a website. I might e-mail him and ask him what he was thinking.

2012-01-17T19:41:00.001Z

I'm beginning to wonder if it might be possible to make a living from photography without going any further than my living room balcony...

I could just pop my head out of the window every morning and let the photogenic subjects come to me.

But moving on from the sun to my daughter, Amelie returned home to us yesterday, bringing with her half a tin of Dulux and a roller. Since doing up the flat eighteen months ago, we've been storing the leftover paint at the headquarters of the decorating firm we employed, which just happens to be based in my parents' garage. So we asked Am to collect some supplies on her way back, in the hope of repairing the damage done by my over-enthusiastic mould cleaning on Saturday.

When I got home from work yesterday, she came running down the hallway to greet me, and the first words out of her mouth were: "Daddy! Can I help you paint the wall with a roller?!"

So I picked her up, gave her a hug, and said "Of course you can, darling!"

The look which appeared on Lisa's face is hard to describe, but I'd place it somewhere between horror, disbelief, and major panic that she might have married a lunatic.

Admittedly, the idea of handing your three-year-old a fully-loaded paint roller, and letting her loose within two feet of a cream-coloured sofa, might seem like the height of lunacy, but there was method in my madness: I knew it would make a good blog post.

As it transpired, Lisa's fears were entirely unfounded. I gave Amelie a thorough talking to before we started, explaining the finer points of interior design and the consequences of getting paint on my CD collection, and this was the result...

She's like a cross between Michelangelo and Rolf Harris. But with no clothes and more talent. I might let her do the whole flat.

2012-01-16T19:18:00.004Z

It goes without saying that the main advantage of being without Amelie for a couple of days was the opportunity it gave us to rid the flat of fungus, wash the fruit juice from the furniture, and take the piss out of the carpets. But in addition to catching up on the housework, our child-free weekend meant that I was able to get out of the flat for a few hours yesterday afternoon and spend some time with another woman. And what a woman. Frankly she made Lisa look like Mrs Mouse in a burkha.

We actually went to see The Iron Lady...

That's not her on the left. That's the film I would have chosen to see. Sadly, however, despite being a sci-fi blockbuster full of aliens, explosions and all-action adventure, Lisa was put off by the fact that it has an average rating of 11% on Rotten Tomatoes and has been universally panned by the critics. So we rejected the 3D in favour of something more one-dimensional.

We were actually torn between Thatcher and 'Shame'. Not only do they sound pretty similar, but they're written by the same person, so it probably didn't make much difference. In the end, Maggie won over the sex addicts, and we opted for a blue movie of a more Conservative kind.

The last film we went to see was 'The King's Speech' on our honeymoon last March, so we're keeping up our average of one cinema visit every year since Amelie was born. I might be tempted to break that record in 2012 though, because one of the trailers we saw yesterday was for a film adaptation of 'Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close', a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. It's a well known fact that I haven't read a book since 1996, but I do spend a lot of time buying rubbish in charity shops, and I actually picked that up on audiobook for £1 about six months ago, and listened to it on my way to and from work. The New York Press called it 'Extremely Cloying and Incredibly False', but personally I thought it was excellent. So I'm looking forward to seeing that ruined on film.

As for 'The Iron Lady', I must admit I was disappointed. The film-makers appeared to have rejected the notion of either a political biopic or a personal portrait, and instead gone down the confused pensioner route. It was basically ninety minutes of Meryl Streep sitting around in a bedroom. Lisa felt that the point of it all was to show that even the most powerful of people eventually become helpless old codgers, but personally I felt she gave the makers too much credit. I just don't think they knew what they wanted to do, so they ended up doing nothing.

The result was a very frustrating film. Every time it touched on a major issue like the Falklands War or the miners' strike, it sparked instantly into life, only to die moments later by leaving the interesting subject matter completely unexplored, and returning to Maggie in her dressing gown. It barely scratched the surface of her career, and gave no insight into her private life. I really wasn't sure what the point of it all was. And as for the last scene with the teacup, I felt like throwing one at the screen.

That said, I thought Meryl Streep was very good, and it contained one set of lines worth quoting:

Watch your thoughts, for they become words.
Watch your words, for they become actions.
Watch your actions, for they become habits.
Watch your habits, for they become your character.
Watch your character, for it becomes your destiny.

It's just a shame they weren't written by Margaret Thatcher or the author of the film.

2012-01-14T17:34:00.001Z

One of the toughest things you can face as a married man is the sight of another bloke with his arm around your missus...

I feel like Rhodri Giggs. But with less chance of selling my story to The Sun. She's clearly got love in her eyes. And a doily on her head. But let's face it, with a suit like that, he's clearly going to turn a few heads. And stomachs.

The worst part is that I always thought Lisa was the kind of girl who stayed in at the weekends, playing Scrabble with her Mum...

Although with curtains like that, you'd probably want to get out of the house quite a bit.

Anyhoo, I successfully scanned sixty-seven - yes, sixty-seven - old photos last night, before adjusting them, cropping them, and uploading them all to Photobox. But if you think that must have taken ages, you'd be wrong. I was asleep by 1am. Well, a quarter past.

Fortunately I didn't have to be up this morning, as my parents have kindly run off with Amelie this weekend to give us a chance to relax, unwind, and get the Ribena stains out of the sofa. I'm sitting here surrounded by ten naked cushions and the gentle hum of the tumble-dryer finishing off our dry-clean-only sofa covers on a very high heat.

It's been a day of discovery, because in addition to testing whether our cushion covers can survive a spin cycle, I also found a mould farm down the back of the sofa. Obviously we're no strangers to fungus, and there are strong rumours that the caravan city outside is linked to the council's plans to re-render the exterior of the block in an effort to solve the damp problem, but this was still a momentous discovery, because whilst we've had mould in both bedrooms and the bathroom, we've never before lived with it in the lounge.

Needless to say, black mould on your mauve walls is not a desirable look, so I successfully removed it all this afternoon. And replaced it with some attractive pale turquoise patches. It seems that despite using the same brand of mould cleaner in both bedrooms without the slightest hint of a problem, the paint on the living room wall has reacted like I've thrown a bucket of bleach at it, and now looks like a piece of modern art.

I'm in good company though, because whilst I've been redecorating the living room in two-tone pastels, Lisa's been experimenting with a cutting-edge, state-of-the-art hair dye which guarantees to be 100% drip-free. She's been waltzing around the flat with a black cape on, looking like Michael Keaton in Batman. But with more confidence, and much darker hair. The results are pretty spectacular. In fact her hair looks so good, she's decided to go out tonight. Just as soon as she's finished cleaning all the drips off the computer chair, carpet and my bedside cabinet.

2012-01-13T18:58:00.002Z

I said to Lisa this evening, "It's Friday the 13th today. Have you had any bad luck?"

She replied, "No more than usual".

So on that positive note, it's my mother-in-law's birthday in two weeks time. Assuming she lives that long. Lisa and I are spending the weekend sorting through old photos to scan, upload, and turn into a professionally printed photo-book to present her with on the day. Ideally, we're looking for pictures of the lady herself, but personally I'm more distracted by her daughter...

That's my wife on the left, aged about eight. Which is surprising, as I didn't think cameras had been invented back then. We don't know who the stunner on the right is, but I'm sensing she's not a relation.

On the subject of things which looked good in the seventies, my Dad passed on the news this week that the Wish Tower in Eastbourne is set to be demolished. The council has been considering its future for a while now, but after a slight breeze took the roof off in December, they've decided to knock the whole thing down and start again.

Rumours that this hard-hitting exposé played a major role in the council's decision have yet to be confirmed, but suffice it to say that the BBC's sub-heading of 'Suffering and Fortitude' is more apt than they realise.

2012-01-12T19:11:00.002Z

On balance, I think I prefer today's sunrise...

It looks a bit like the German flag has finally been raised over England, but apart from that, I like it.

I was working in Brighton yesterday, so I had the pleasure of taking Amelie to and from nursery for the first time. It was a bit like escorting a prisoner on day release, but without the time off for good behaviour. Dropping her off wasn't too much of a problem - the only difficulty I had was getting her to pause long enough to say goodbye before she ran off to play - but picking her up was a different story.

With the ever present threat of paedophiles lurking on every street corner, and statistics showing that at any given time there are upwards of ninety-three child molesters, violent abductors and kiddy-fiddlers within a ten-metre radius of where you're standing, security at the nursery is naturally tight. Getting Amelie out of there was like springing Charles Manson from a maximum security prison.

When I dropped her off, they were happy to take the girl off my hands without a fuss, but returning as a single unaccompanied man clearly put me on the danger list for the axis of evil. Having rung the doorbell outside and got no response whatsoever, I was met by another parent on her way out. I told her they weren't answering my calls, and she informed me that there's a video camera hidden in the doorbell, and they're probably studying me as we speak and deciding I fit the profile of a paedophile. Those weren't her exact words, but I knew what she meant.

Undeterred, I snuck through the door as she left, only to be confronted by another locked door with a keypad. Lisa had given me the code that morning, but I'd burnt it after reading, and committed it to my unfailing memory. So naturally by 5pm I'd forgotten it. As luck would have it, another parent arrived, refused to give me the code, and forced me to make a second daring entry attempt by piggy-backing her through the door. Not literally.

By the time I'd made it through a bolted gate, down the corridor and through another closed door to the pre-school room, I felt like I was on an episode of Prison Break. Frankly if Bin Laden had set up home there, he'd still be alive now.

Fortunately, once there, I was greeted by a happy little three-year-old who was very pleased to see me. Not Amelie, obviously, but a little boy who came running up to me, smiling, and said "I showed Amelie how to wash her hands today!". I didn't tell him that's more than I've ever done.

While my own daughter completely ignored me, he then said "This is for you..."

... and handed me the drawing on the left. It was like being passed a note by a lifer at visiting time. Either it's a coded message he wanted me to get out to his loved ones, or it's a picture of a llama lying down. I'm not sure which. But either way, I was grateful. He was the only person who acted like he wanted me to be there.

In the end, I had to virtually drag Amelie out of there by her wrists. There was a quiet beeping as we left, which I think was the sound of the staff phoning social services. Unfortunately she appears to have brought something home with her. She was up in the night, barking like a seal and telling us her throat hurts. So we need to keep that quiet. If they discover she's walked out with a cough, they might try to charge us extra.

2012-01-11T19:17:00.000Z

This was the view from our balcony at seven-thirty this morning...

Believe it or not, I haven't tinkered with that photo at all. Those were the exact colours on display as the sun came up over Brighton today. Obviously I'd rather have been looking at the inside of my eyelids at that time in the morning, but the sunrise came a close second.

2012-01-10T19:04:00.006Z

Having returned home from our winter retreat in St Leonards the Sunday before last, and carried eight bags of Amelie's presents up from the car, I decided to spend the Bank Holiday Monday sorting out her toys. In addition to cramming her wardrobe so full of stuff that no one's ever going to find Narnia, my main masterstroke was to gather together all of the various cuddly toys that she likes to take to bed, and place them in a handy red basket by the window, so that instead of wasting five minutes every night running around the flat looking for the specific one she wants, she can simply choose one from the basket and hop into bed.

It was a plan with no drawbacks. At least I thought so, until this morning...

That was the scene which greeted me when I opened her bedroom door at 7:30am. It's like she's been looting at Toys R Us. On the bright side, however, she can no longer see her Peppa Pig duvet, which according to the Daily Telegraph is a good thing.

The only toy not visible in that picture is her cuddly Gruffalo, so here's another photo...

To be honest, it's not really visible in that one either. But she is holding it in her left hand.

I took Amelie out for a walk after work last night, and she insisted on taking the Gruffalo with us to protect her from flies, bees and giants. (No, me neither). I'd intended just to stroll down to the seafront and then head straight back, but unfortunately when we got there, she spotted a number of evening joggers, and before I knew it, she was sprinting towards the pier like Anthony Worrall Thompson through the checkouts at Tesco. By the time I caught up with her, we were close to both the Brighton Wheel and a heart attack.

But in addition to an extreme cardiovascular workout, Amelie also provided me with a smile. And made a total stranger laugh. She has a habit at the moment of coming out with creative new descriptions for everyday things. Only the other day, she told me over dinner that her fizzy pop was wonderbubble, and her runner beans vegelicious. Which is not only a new word, but a surprising sentiment for a three-year-old.

So last night we were walking down Eaton Place, past Patsy Palmer's house, when a man came out of a side street with a dog on a lead. There was no traffic, and the night was quiet, but as the man crossed the road in front of us, Amelie broke the silence by announcing with great gusto, and in a very loud voice, "That dog is hairy-fantastic!".

As shaggy dog stories go, it was a little on the short side, but the owner walked off in hysterics.

2012-01-09T19:58:00.007Z

I was invited to a meeting at work this morning to discuss the creation of a new department website. I've been asked to rewrite the text to make it all a bit more "friendly". So I'll be using the word 'darling' a lot, and finding some photos of come-to-bed eyes.

Obviously my ability to string a sentence together is one thing, but to be honest, I think the main factor which makes me the go-to guy for website production is my ability to stand shoulder to shoulder with the world's great Olympians at the top of the Google search rankings. No, really.

As mentioned here previously, if you enter the words 'Robin Cousins' into Google, you get this...

It's a photo of me. And some other bloke.

It's a well documented fact that I'm essentially a gay icon in the world of figure skating. Although I manage to keep my head down for most of the year. So I was particularly pleased to see the new series of 'Dancing on Ice' begin on ITV1 last night. When I say 'see', I don't mean that I watched it. I'm not an idiot. But I did keep a close eye on my blog stats...

The spike in November was when Big Sis linked to this post on Facebook, and the world turned up to stare in open-mouthed wonder at her acting. But frankly, Cousins can trump sisters any day of the week. I had enough visitors yesterday to knock Sis into a cocked hat. I'd like to think a lot of them were reading about the framing of Madge and Stella, but the fact is that most were after a bird's eye view of Robin. I really need to start selling merchandise before next week's episode.

2012-01-08T12:19:00.003Z

Amelie told me yesterday that she'd like Chloe to have lots of little white kittens. I told her that's unlikely to happen, so naturally she asked me why. With hindsight, I probably should have just pointed out that Chloe's fifteen, and the cat equivalent of Barbara Cartland. Except that her ivory tower's a council block. Unfortunately I was a bit more honest. So I'm now being pestered to buy a boy cat.

That was just one of the charming conversations we had yesterday while Lisa was out at the AA convention. Frankly it was more tiring than going to work. But I did enjoy the moment when Amelie discovered that I'd neatly placed two of her books inside the book stack table, at which point she turned to me and said "Daddy, you're a genius!". At least she got something right.

On the subject of books and intellectual decisions, I bought a classic work of poetry on Friday. And what's more, I've read it. Although some of the pages were missing. I was working in Crawley, so naturally I found myself in the Save the Children charity shop at lunchtime, where they were having a half-price January sale. I was browsing the bric-a-brac, and I came across this...

If that looks like the inside page of a poetry book, it's because it is. Unfortunately the rest of the book wasn't attached. Someone had taken the first two pages of a book called 'Poems of Shelley', personally inscribed to Stella with a heartfelt Christmas message from Madge and Janine (Jonnie? Jannice?), and then framed it. And 'Save the Children' were selling it for 50p. Reduced to 25p in the sale.

I spent so long puzzling over this, I almost made myself late back to work, so in the end I decided it was worth spending 25p on the mystery, and bought it.

The point is this: if I were Stella, and Madge had given me a work of poetry for Christmas, I would certainly be inclined to chuck most of the book in the bin. Particularly as Madge clearly doesn't like me enough to put 'Dear', 'Love', or spell the word 'Christmas'. I'm not sure I'd have bothered to keep the inscription, and I certainly wouldn't have spent money on a frame, but other than that, it makes sense.

However, that can't be what happened. Above the inky words of her Madgesty is the date 10/06 and the price £1.00, both written in pencil. Now, if Madge is half the woman I think she is, there's no way she'd have inscribed a book to Stella without removing the price first. She's economical with her words, but she doesn't want to look like a cheapskate.

So it wasn't Stella who framed it. It was Stella who sold it. I'm liking her more and more. In fact, I'd buy Stella a beer if I met her. So Stella clearly received the book prior to 2006, put up with it for at least six months, and then chucked it out in the summer. It must have been sold as a book for a pound (a bargain, because it's £4.50 here), at which point the person who bought it decided that the poems of Shelley were rubbish, but the inscription was worth framing. The question is, why?.

Presumably Madge meant nothing to them, and if they thought it was valuable, they wouldn't have ripped it out of the book. Or given it away to charity and let an idiot buy it for 25p. It's a mystery wrapped in an enigma. I suggested to Lisa that we hang it on the living room wall as a conversation piece, but she wasn't keen. Apparently we talk enough rubbish without putting junk on the wall.

2012-01-06T20:20:00.002Z

At the end of January last year, we met up with our old friends Crash & Donna (or Chris & Donald, as Amelie likes to call them), and went out for breakfast in Brighton. Here's a photo of us all together...

We look like one of the line-ups from the Identity Parade round on 'Never Mind the Buzzcocks'. At least I thought we did, until last night's edition on BBC2...

Number five definitely looks the part, but the others barely resemble us at all. Although I look a bit like number four.

Still, it comes to something when one of your friends is being introduced to Vic Reeves by a Natural Born Killer, using the words "C U next Tuesday". Things like that usually only happen in my dreams.

2012-01-05T20:08:00.002Z

While I was in Haywards Heath yesterday, hearing about Tufty getting hammered, Brighton Council were busy doing some DIY of their own. I came home from work last night to find that in the space of a few hours, they'd built four portacabins on the grass outside our flat...

For a moment, I thought we had gypsies. As mere residents, we obviously haven't been told what's going on, but the council came back today and erected a fifth one, before digging a hole and connecting it up to the electricity supply. So I think they're re-homing asylum seekers. Or preparing for a Hollywood film. It's like having a row of Winnebagos parked outside.

That wasn't the only momentous thing which happened yesterday though. It was also Amelie's first ever day at nursery. And needless to say, there were tears. Not when she got there, but when she had to go home. It was only an hour-long settling-in session, but they had a water play area with ponies, which is pretty much everything Amelie wants in life. Frankly she was in hog heaven, and Lisa could barely drag her out of there.

They returned today for settling-in session number two, and Amelie's already made a best friend called Mandy. A lot of toddlers can be selfish with their toys, but apparently Mandy came and she gave without taking.

Unfortunately, the shine's been taken off the situation entirely by the news we received this morning, which is that despite having registered Amelie solely for the fifteen free hours a week she's entitled to by law (in fact, she'll only be there for twelve), the nursery's going to charge us almost fifty pounds a month anyway. It seems that the hours you do are irrelevant, and nobody gets away without paying. As Lisa was told this morning "We'd go out of business if everyone just had the free hours and paid nothing".

In addition, the government entitlement is for 15 hours of free nursery education for 38 weeks of the year (to tie-in with school term times), so we assumed we'd just keep her at home in the holidays. Apparently not. The nursery have said she'll lose her place if she doesn't attend throughout August. And if she attends throughout August, we'll be paying the full fees.

So we're not very happy. Especially as Amelie won a place there six months ago, and they've waited until she's started, fallen in love with the place, and made a new friend, before telling us it's going to cost us big time. Naturally we're looking for someone to blame, and it appears we may have found him. It's all David Cameron's fault.

2012-01-04T18:22:00.005Z

I was in Haywards Heath today, where I discovered a shop selling just about everything you could ever want in life...

The only thing they don't supply is top quality anecdotes, but as luck would have it, I picked up one of those at the St Catherine's Hospice Shop around the corner.

I was idly browsing the menswear section at lunchtime today, when the lady on the till asked her colleague if she'd had a nice Christmas. An innocuous question, you might think, but one which resulted in an answer so surprising that I actually loitered in the shop just to hear the end of the story.

Apparently the lady had been staying with friends for Christmas, and as she arrived home a few days ago, her neighbour came rushing out to inform her that whilst she'd been away, a squirrel had got into her house via the chimney and set off the burglar alarm. Fortunately the neighbour had a set of keys, and was able to go in and turn off the alarm, but the lady was naturally concerned that the squirrel might have caused a lot of damage, so she asked her neighbour how long it had been in there for.

The news was good. The whole thing had only happened that morning, the neighbour had gone straight in, and the squirrel had spent less than half an hour in the house. From that point on, however, the news took a turn for the worse.

The lady continued her story by posing this innocent question to her colleague:

"Now, if you were going to remove a squirrel from your neighbour's house, how would you do it?".

The colleague said she would open all the doors and try shooing it out. The lady herself suggested throwing a blanket over the creature, and scooping it up safely. Neither of those things had happened.

Instead, the neighbour had summoned "her gentleman friend" to deal with the situation in his own inimitable style. As the charity shop colleague put it, in a slightly alarmed voice, "Don't tell me he used a shotgun?"

"No," the lady said. "A hammer."

Apparently the gentleman friend had entered the neighbour's house armed with nothing but a carpentry set, and in an admirable feat of agility and lightning-fast reflexes, had succeeded in getting close enough to the squirrel to hit it on the head with a hammer.

Game over for Tufty, you might think. Sadly not. Despite being smashed in the skull with a piece of DIY equipment, the squirrel, which up until this point had caused no damage whatsoever, survived the blow, and immediately set off across the living room at high speed with blood spurting from its head like a fountain. The neighbour's squeeze took off in hot pursuit, and by the time the creature was cornered by the three piece suite, and a second, fatal blow delivered, there was a trail of blood on the carpet, and the wallpaper had been redecorated in red. Frankly a shotgun would have caused less damage.

Of course, when you've given new meaning to the phrase 'Hammer Horror' by creating an indoor sprinkler system out of a squirrel, turned your neighbour's house into a crime scene, and found yourself standing on the sofa with blood on your hands, you're naturally going to want to clear things up a little. And sure enough, the gentleman politely removed the corpse from the living room.

The charity shop colleague then asked the lady what he did with it. She rolled her eyes before answering:

"He left it on the lawn for the crows".

If I were her, I'd move house.

2012-01-03T20:04:00.003Z

I've no idea what was going on with the weather in Brighton this morning, but walking down the hill past A&E at 8:30am was like trekking down a wind tunnel in a tsunami. I took this photo from our living room window before I left for work...

... and frankly it was no better on dry land. Not that there was any. I'd have driven the 400 metres to work, but I wasn't sure it was passable without a hovercraft. By the time I reached OPD, I was soaked through and could no longer feel my face. My first patient said it wasn't weather for the faint-hearted. I told her to forget the faint-hearted and spare a thought for the bald-headed. That's the last time I leave home without a hat.

2012-01-02T21:12:00.002Z

I had an e-mail while we were away from this chap, suggesting that as the owner of MulledWhines.net, I might like to buy 'Whines.net' off him for five hundred bucks. It's a tempting offer, obviously, but not one I'm inclined to accept. Mainly because it turns my witty domain into one that just sounds like I'm moaning.

Intriguingly though, he states in the e-mail that "I am offering this domain name to several potential buyers over the next few days, and the first one to agree to buy it for $500 will get it". So I'm clearly not the only one with 'Whines' in my website address. Unless he's flogging it to the owner of Gripes.com.

On the subject of this blog, since redecorating at the weekend, I've changed the format of my archive listing (on the right, scroll down), and it's inadvertently revealed the surprising news that 2011 was my most prolific blogging year since I met Lisa. I'm clearly spending less time with her than ever before. I could get up now and go and join her on the sofa, but there's not really any great need. If I want to know how she's doing, I can just check her status on Facebook.

Looking at those figures, however, it's also apparent just what a bad year 2006 was. It was the year that Lisa needed me more than any other, and the time I felt least like blogging. I was watching a wise and worldly woman on TV the other night (it was Kerry Katona if you must know) and she said that alcohol is a harder habit to kick than heroin. I think she was pissed at the time. I've no idea if her words are true (I haven't given up either), but I do know that what Lisa's done over the past five years has been phenomenal.

It's the annual Brighton AA Convention next weekend, and this year Lisa will be attending, not only as someone with long term sobriety, but as the treasurer of a city centre meeting and, as of yesterday, the Chairperson of the International AA Public Information Committee. She's spreading sobering thoughts across the world.

After a year in which she lost the teeth she'd spent her life savings on, and then the baby she'd set her heart on, the fact that the above paragraph is still true, and hasn't all gone by the wayside, is both remarkable and admirable. She also has to cope with Amelie's bad behaviour, which is enough to turn anyone to drink.

Mind you, Amelie has a lot to cope with herself. She dreamt the night before last that she was being chased by a horde of snakes who were, and I quote, "licking my hair and making it knotty". Venomous snakes are bad enough, but when they start ruining your hair, you've got good reason to wake up screaming.

Anyhoo, 2011 has been a challenging year in many ways, but the manner in which my wife and daughter have come through it is a source of great pride to me, and I love them both loads. So while Amelie battles snakes in her sleep, I'm going to join Lisa on the sofa. We're catching up on our Christmas TV and doing 'The Big Fat Quiz of the Year'. Love her or not, she'll owe me money by the end of the night.

2012-01-01T22:01:00.000Z

There's no better way to start the new year than with a vision of the Virgin Mary...

Or failing that, Amelie in a towel. She's not so much a vision as a sight.

But the good news is that as of two hours ago, the three of us have managed to get some clothes on and return safely through the flooded countryside of Sussex to our humble home in Brighton. And I'm pleased to say there are no police lines outside. Which is a marked improvement on last year.

2012 is set to be quite an exciting year for us. Assuming it lives up to the film. But sadly, despite doing no partying whatsoever, an afternoon spent packing up all of Amelie's Christmas presents has left me feeling drained and exhausted. By the time I'd loaded up the car with all her stuff, I felt like heading straight to the nearest car boot sale. Frankly she needs to get her own flat, fifteen years ahead of schedule, because I've no idea where we're putting it all.

We've had a very nice week though. We didn't make it far from the sofa, but it's all been very relaxing. I'm not back at work until Tuesday, but I'm already looking forward to my next week off at the end of February. I think we'll be choosing St Leonards for that holiday too.

2011-12-31T23:22:00.000Z

The good thing about having no social life is that you can spend New Year's Eve on the sofa with a laptop, redesigning your blog, without fear of being invited out to a party. Suffice it to say, it's been a productive evening.

In fact, the whole day's been quite fruitful. My parents have a pole with a hook (which reminds me of Lech Walesa in the shipyards) which they use to open the living room curtains. They don't have high ceilings, they just can't get within six feet of the window without a fork lift truck and a hand from Kim & Aggie. So having dragged myself out of bed this morning, I handed the pole to Amelie, told her to draw the curtains, and successfully photographed her being a shepherd...

She's even got the Bo Peep ringlets.

Coincidentally, that photo pretty much sums up my life at my parents' house: remote control, laptop, bass guitar, Pringles, and a pin cushion with a picture of Amelie. It's the acceptable face of voodoo.

As it happens, Lisa had a bad night last night. She kept being woken up by Amelie singing. So she's spent a lot of today catching up on sleep while I mind our three-year-old vocalist. And I minded her quite a lot, if I'm honest. My Mum and I took her to the park this afternoon, where she successfully intimidated a small boy off the swings just by humphing and stamping her feet, after which she informed me that she's the most special girl in the world. I agreed with her just to avoid an argument.

Back home, she and I spent a good three hours (it felt more like six) playing games together on my laptop, the highlight of which was our discovery of Bus Driver Gold, a public transport simulation from the Czech Republic. No, really. As this fantastically written entry on Wikipedia states, "Despite being a Czech game, many of the bus stop names are named after insignificant places in Greater London, England, such as Debden, Collier Row, Feltham, Potters Bar and the terminus Westminster". You can't get more insignificant than Westminster. It's where a lot of great journeys come to an end.

Now, admittedly I'm not living my life at the cutting edge of modern video gaming, and to me, 'Call of Duty' is just the task of taking Amelie to the toilet, but I have to say that I love Bus Driver Gold. You can download a time-limited free trial from the internet, after which you either have to pay through the nose for the full version, or do a thirty-second search on Google and download it illegally for free. I'm not saying which of those I did, but it was Amelie who talked me into it.

She and I spent an hour and a half playing it this evening, and we haven't laughed so much in ages. Basically you get points for driving safely, signalling correctly and arriving at your destination on time, while you lose points for speeding the wrong way down a dual carriageway, making your passengers scream in terror, and smashing into cars, lamp-posts and bus shelters. We finished one game with a score of minus 4,850. I had to abandon another after Amelie dragged a telegraph pole across country and grounded our bus on a mountain.

But despite that, it's enormous fun. In fact, if I dared to leave my co-driver for more than a minute, this is the treatment I got...

She's like Blakey from 'On the Buses'.

2011-12-30T11:53:00.001Z

Amelie turned to me yesterday afternoon and said "Daddy, why are we living at Grandma & Grandad's house?". It's a fair question. Personally I'm not leaving until the food runs out. I'm eating a tube of Pringles a day, and there are still three left, so we're looking at a departure date of Sunday. I need to make sure I get my washing done before we go too. In fact, if we could move in with my parents for a week every month, I could probably pay all my bills. Although I'd need bariatric surgery within a year.

Anyhoo, the lack of a blog post yesterday wasn't so much a result of all the important things I had to do, it was more down to the fact that I've discovered Monopoly on the iPad. I bought it for 69p at the end of September, but it's taken me three months to get the iPad off Amelie. It's only now she's distracted by Christmas presents that I've had a chance to try it.

Unfortunately I've become slightly obsessed since Boxing Day. You could almost say it's monopolising my time. I've spent the past four days wiping the floor with a range of highly skilled opponents (and Lisa) on my way to the top of the property tree. Admittedly, some of the computer-controlled players have the artificial intelligence of a Speak & Spell, and will happily offer you the Old Kent Road in return for Park Lane, but that aside, it's a very good game. And it cost less than a cuddly antelope in a dress, which is always a sign of good value.

In addition to being a ruthless real estate magnate, I also walked into St Leonards yesterday, where I discovered a shop called iKandi which sold glasses. That was enough to make my day.

It's also a year now since I revamped my main website, so I spent some time yesterday intending to do the same with my blog. I've had this design since 30th May 2010, and I'm getting a bit bored, so I'm tempted to rearrange the furniture for the new year. Unfortunately, having spent two hours last night tinkering behind the scenes, I decided I didn't like the results, and scrapped all the changes. But I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a transformation in the next couple of days. I need something to do while I'm eating the Pringles.

2011-12-28T20:45:00.003Z

Sadly, Big Sis had to return to Wiltshire yesterday to watch some grass grow and dream of living within fifty miles of an Asda. She left a lasting impression on Amelie though. Or she would have done if the wind had changed.

My brother and his family stayed another night, but they too departed this morning, leaving Lisa, Amelie and me as the only house guests still outstaying our welcome. Fortunately, however, we managed a family game of charades before everyone fled, the highlight of which was when my Dad attempted to convey a two-word film by simply pointing at Lisa. I immediately shouted "Desperate Housewives!", only to be told it was 'Pretty Woman'. I don't think I came out of that very well.

But the good news is that since leaving us yesterday afternoon, Big Sis has had a change of heart, and decided that I can post the video of her dancing. Even though she looks fat. (Those are her words, not mine). Unfortunately for her, I've had a change of heart too, and I don't really want to. I can be awkward like that. But for the sake of family unity, I've decided to compromise, and publish a short excerpt which makes both her and Amelie look good. Amelie, because it showcases her finest dance step, and Sis, because she's not really in it.

This was actually filmed during an encore performance on Boxing Day, and features my niece just out of shot on the left. She also threatened me with violence if I publish the whole thing, so I'm treading a fine line here. Much like Amelie on the dance floor...

It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase 'foot-tapping music'. I'd also like to congratulate my parents on doing their bit for healthy eating by disguising the seven tubes of Pringles with a fruit bowl.

As it happens, I'm going to need Amelie's talents as a dancer to start paying the bills pretty soon. My car had its annual service and MOT today, and needed £600 worth of work done. At least, that's what they told me. To be honest, it felt exactly the same when I drove it home as when I drove it there, so I think they just parked it outside for six hours and topped up my screenwash. Admittedly, with the cost of printer ink these days, that MOT certificate can't have come cheap, but I do wonder if my daughter's not the only one leading me a merry dance.

2011-12-27T16:23:00.001Z

The day after Boxing Day, and half of us are on the floor...

To be honest, it's a miracle we're still speaking to each other. We had our annual Christmas Quiz last night, a family bonding ritual which is now in its third glorious year. It started in 2009, when my then-10-year-old niece spent the week leading up to Christmas preparing five pages of questions for us all to answer, little knowing that by Boxing Day we'd all be at death's door, and barely able to answer the phone to a doctor, never mind a question on the history of Manga.

Despite that, it proved to be the highlight of the festive season (narrowly beating the moment that Lisa threw up in a bin), so we repeated it under slightly better circumstances last year. It's now on the verge of becoming a family tradition, and the main reason we all meet up at Christmas.

Last night's quiz featured five rounds, for which we were divided into two equally-matched teams (we gave them Amelie in return for a tin of biscuits), and the whole thing was scored out of 64. Now, you might think that questions set by a 12-year-old would be simple. And they were. But not as simple as the contestants. My parents' team scored 36. Which I thought was pretty poor. Until we scored 29.

I think the lowlight for me was when my sister-in-law suggested that Kilimanjaro was the highest mountain in the world. And was promptly believed by my sister. I had to point out to them that it's been climbed by Chris Moyles and Denise Van Outen. And even then, they weren't convinced. Fortunately things picked up when I spectacularly named the singer who wrote 'Party in the USA' by Miley Cyrus, after which we attempted some sophisticated sabotage by sending Amelie into the opposing camp with instructions to tell them that Cheryl Cole's aged fifty.

I saw red when my niece asked us to "Name the band in the picture below"...

... but our biggest failing was in the round which appears every year without fail: an entire section of questions about my niece. To ensure fairness, my team included her mother, while the opposition had her father. The round was scored out of 17, and featured questions about her likes, dislikes, friends and hobbies. Naturally, with insider information from her Mum, I was expecting maximum points for our team.

We ended up with 8. They got 4. And she's not even adopted. Admittedly, no one could have guessed that her favourite food is something she hasn't eaten for two months, but when it came to naming her first high school, I think we could have done better. My sister-in-law walked her to the gates, and she still got it wrong.

2011-12-26T08:10:00.004Z

It's Amelie on Christmas Day!

Those beautiful wooden letters were given to her by Lisa's friend, Dot. They're useful because they allow me to label her when she's having a tantrum.

Not that you should label children, obviously. Unless you're sending them through the post.

Anyhoo, that was Amelie having the time of her life yesterday. To be honest, when you've started your day with a cuddly antelope in a dress, things can only go downhill. And sure enough, Christmas Day at Gardner Towers didn't quite go according to plan. Big Sis had arrived for the festive season on Friday, with Lisa, Amelie and myself getting here on Saturday. That just left the Essex wing of the family, who were due to arrive at 1pm yesterday in time for Christmas dinner.

Unfortunately, my brother phoned at twelve-thirty to say they hadn't left yet. Apparently my sister-in-law had been out for an Asian meal on Christmas Eve, and her stomach was Thai'd up in knots. Having pulled everything out of the oven, and become the first people ever to extend the concept of par-baking to turkey, we anxiously awaited news, and were delighted to receive a text message at 3pm to say they were leaving.

And slightly less delighted to get another one at 3:45 to say they'd turned back. Needless to say, some people couldn't wait any longer for their lunch...

That's Amelie saying grace, and praying that her Aunt & Uncle will arrive safely with presents. She's the only person in Britain who eats salad cream with her Christmas dinner. Apart from Lisa's Mum.

The most tragic part of this tale is that my brother and sister-in-law were bringing the desserts. I'm not saying I don't value their company on Christmas Day, but when they're in possession of a Crème Brûlée Cheesecake and a Raspberry & Mascarpone Roulade, I do feel the loss more keenly.

Sadly, however, we had no choice but to soldier on without them. Big Sis and Amelie did their best to lift our spirits by performing a dance routine to 'Reach' by S Club 7. I have the whole thing on video, but sadly I've been threatened with violence if I publish it on the web. Which is bizarre for someone who's happy for the world to see this.

In addition, Amelie dipped into her wide repertoire of jokes, including her current favourite "Where do fish keep their money? In a cave." and "What's white and goes up? A dead snowball.", before moving on to her famous range of impressions...

When it came to presents, Amelie was particularly pleased with Buckaroo, plus a pair of puppies called Max and Mitzi which come with their own stethoscope. She spent most of the day telling us how ill they were. Big Sis, meanwhile, did her bit for the sisterhood by giving her niece a vacuum cleaner.

As for me, there was only one thing I wanted, and that was a new camera. My parents, brother and sister had all agreed to club together, pool their resources and contribute as much as they could afford. So I was expecting a Kodak Fun Flash. As it transpired, however, I received the one I wanted, and spent the evening having a ball with my Canon. The photos on this blog should improve from tomorrow.

The even better news is that my brother's family finally arrived at six-thirty looking like a scene from a Christmas carol. Well, his wife looked like Jacob Marley's ghost. We just had time to wish her a Merry Christmas before she retired to her sick bed with a festive bucket. We had to swap the After Eight mints for Bisodol. But still, things could be worse. This could be Christmas 2009.

2011-12-25T12:14:00.001Z

In the true spirit of Christmas, Lisa and I travelled back to the town of my birth yesterday to spend the festive season surrounded by wise men and angels. We didn't make the journey on a donkey, but I was sitting on my ass. We even had Shepherds Pie on arrival. Frankly it couldn't have been more like the nativity unless Lisa had given birth in the shed. Which she refused to do for health & safety reasons.

The good news, however, is that despite doing a runner across Sussex, Father Christmas successfully tracked us down overnight, and delivered a sockful of gifts for Amelie this morning. We own the only child in Britain who slept right through the night and had to be physically woken up at nine-thirty this morning, but having forced her reluctantly out of bed and insisted that she join in the festive fun, she received the kind of gift that most kids can only dream of...

75p from a charity shop. Santa is such a thrifty shopper.

Anyhoo, despite Amelie's assertion that it's a goat, the horned beast above is actually an Arabian Oryx. In a flowery dress. It's the closest she'll get to Dubai until she's eighteen and marries a footballer.

2011-12-24T12:35:00.001Z

It was my last working day of the year yesterday, so now I'm on holiday for the festive season, I've got plenty of time to watch some of those classic old black & white films they always show at Christmas...

Christmas is obviously a time to spend with the ones you love, so whilst packing Lisa's bags last night, I turned to Amelie, who was bouncing on the bed at the time, and asked her which member of the family she thinks I love the most. She pondered the question for a moment, and then said "Chloe!".

Obviously she was right first time, but Lisa was in the room, so for appearance's sake, I asked her to guess again. Whereupon she pointed at me and said "You!".

Yep, I love Chloe and myself. She's pretty much got me bang to rights there.

2011-12-23T19:34:00.000Z

I mentioned two weeks ago that Lisa's mother was riding a wave of good fortune all the way to an offshore account in Millionaire's Row. And I wasn't wrong. It's just a shame I've knocked her off before she got there.

As it happens, my mother-in-law matched four numbers on the lottery on Wednesday night, netting her £85. Which is £75 more than I've ever won. So buoyed by her success, convinced of her lucky streak, and with some considerable cash to flash, she phoned us up at noon yesterday on the offchance that I might have popped home for lunch. I hadn't. If I had, she'd have asked me to invest some of her winnings on a horse.

The horse she wanted to back was Sycho Fred, running in the 1:20 race at Sedgefield. She was attracted to the name because she'd just been to visit Lisa's uncle. I was in Mile Oak at the time, with an NHS computer that doesn't allow access to betting sites. Lisa was at home, but with no idea how to operate my Betfair account. And Amelie's too young to gamble. So Lisa told her we couldn't help.

As a result, she didn't put the bet on. And the wave of good fortune came crashing down around her. Sycho Fred won at odds of 40-1. I could have got 50-1 on the internet. Frankly I'd have made more money if I'd taken a day's unpaid leave and gone down the bookies.

But on a brighter note, I popped around there after work this afternoon to commiserate with my mother-in-law, offer my apologies, and ask to borrow a fiver, and she gave me a copy of yesterday's Argus. It featured a review of the Numberjacks show we saw on Sunday. I'm not sure what took them so long - I published mine on Monday and I'm not even being paid. But it's nice to see they agree with me...

I said "a cross between a ninja and a serial killer". They said the Milk Tray man in a gimp mask. It amounts to the same thing.

2011-12-22T17:40:00.000Z

Before I went to bed last night, I noticed that Amelie's wooden sheep stool, which normally resides next to the sofa in the living room, had somehow found its way out to the hallway. I asked Lisa who had moved it, and she told me that Amelie had left it there that morning.

Naturally I asked her why, and the explanation came with a roll of the eyes:

"I put the Mingles on a higher shelf."

You have to admire the girl's ingenuity. I'd send her to the naughty step, but she'd probably just use it to reach chocolates.

As it happens, I was standing next to that sheep stool in the hallway at 7:30 this morning, packing my work bag with bananas, when someone started banging on the front door. We do actually have a doorbell, so I took it as a sign of aggression and assumed it was someone coming to accuse us of industrial drilling at midnight. As a result, I almost didn't open it. But in the spirit of Christmas and goodwill to all men, I decided to bite the bullet, load it into my shotgun, and meet the visitor head on.

And I'm glad I did. It turned out to be a swarthy looking temp from Royal Mail, with a festive special delivery. Having scribbled on his machine with the kind of signature that makes Amelie's pictures look legible, he handed me a box containing this:

Yes, it's another bespoke Christmas card from the man who brought us 'Chlo-Chlo On Your Head', the artist formally known as Mr Cheshire. He's moved on from Fidel Castro to Heston Blumenthal, and produced another turkey.

But not only did the box contain my favourite Christmas card so far (with apologies to everyone else who's sent me one), it also featured a photo of Mick Kitson with all his own teeth, a bag of chocolate Christmas trees for Amelie (I'll put them on the shelf and let her help herself), and the following CD album...

Not everyone's aware that Cary Grant played Aspley Guise Village Hall in December 1990. In fact, some people think he was dead. But for connoisseurs like myself, the music lives on, and now I can listen to it any time I like, thanks to this rediscovered and digitally remastered live recording.

Unfortunately I'm writing this during my lunch break at the Mile Oak Medical Centre, where the only sound system belongs to the audiology department, so I haven't actually heard it yet. But I just know it's gonna be good. The word on the street is that it's the best thing Cary Grant did, post 1986.

2011-12-21T20:41:00.000Z

It's the annual Burning of the Clocks in Brighton tonight, which is the only time of the year when you can see faces light up on the seafront without the use of ice cream. I last went three years ago, in the days when I still had the energy to walk out of the door after 7pm on a work night. A lot's changed since then. Suffice it to say that if you plot the graph of my lethargy against Amelie's age, you get a 45 degree line.

So I'm not going tonight either. Frankly I can barely make it to the sofa. But as it happens, this year's festival has proved entertaining without me even leaving the flat. The Argus are reporting today that the organisers, Same Sky, have been contacted by the Sussex Wildlife Trust, to warn them about the dangers of releasing sky lanterns during the procession. It's resulted in this immortal headline:

SKY LANTERN BLAMED FOR OWL DEATH
And the following informative article:

"People are being warned about using sky lanterns after a barn owl was burnt and killed.

Sussex Wildlife Trust (SWT) sent out an e-newsletter warning people that the lanterns are a danger to wildlife following the injuries to the owl.

It's not clear how the lantern injured the owl."

When it comes to night-flying, nothing can hold a candle to a barn owl. Apart from a sky lantern.

2011-12-20T20:18:00.007Z

I wrapped up all of Amelie's Christmas presents last night, and I'll say one thing for charity shop gifts - you'd never know they were cheap once you've covered them in Smart Price paper. They look gorgeous. She'll never guess that most of them cost less than a pound.

To be honest though, she doesn't deserve any presents. Lisa's got a festive box of Mingles, which are basically After Eights for the working classes, and she's keeping them on a shelf in the hall. About an hour ago, I was sitting at the computer in the living room, and I noticed the door being gently pulled shut. I assumed it was Lisa trying to save on the heating bills, but when I got up two minutes later, I found the doors to both bedrooms closed, Lisa napping on the bed, and Amelie nowhere to be found.

Obviously I could have investigated further by opening Amelie's bedroom door, but frankly if there's one thing I've learnt from three years of fatherhood, it's that if Amelie offers you five minutes of peace and quiet, take it. So I ignored her and went back in the living room.

Five minutes later, I heard her bedroom door open, and Amelie walked in with chocolate around her mouth. I asked her where she'd been, and she said "In my bedroom". So I asked her what she'd been doing. She said "Just playing". Before adding "That's all".

Needless to say, the other thing I've learnt from three years of fatherhood is not to believe a word she says, so I got up, walked into her bedroom, and found a pile of Mingles wrappers on the floor. It was basically Ocean's 3½. And if we'd taught her to wipe her own mouth and use a bin, she'd have gotten away with it.

It's hard to be cross with her though, when she's capable of expressing such heartfelt love through the medium of art. She drew this picture of Lisa yesterday...

Not only has she accurately captured her mother's slinky hips, twinkling eyes and charismatic smile, but she looks a bit unsteady on her pins. It's Lisa to a tee.

2011-12-19T19:25:00.003Z

The problem with giving Lisa a break by taking Amelie off her hands for twenty-four hours, is that she liked it so much, she now wants a divorce so that I'll have the girl every weekend. The only thing keeping us together is the fact that she can't put the ironing board up on her own.

But while we argue over who gets custody of Chloe, the good news is that we managed to spend one last Sunday as a family, by treating Amelie to an afternoon of culture at the Brighton Theatre Royal yesterday. The show we took her to see was 'Numberjacks', so to be honest there was probably more culture in the bacteria on her fingers, but having enjoyed ninety minutes of maths-based fun, she can now count those fingers with ease.

For anyone not familiar with the Cbeebies Numberjacks show, it's just your average, everyday tale of a group of googly-eyed numbers who live in a sofa and solve problems using their magical Brain Gain, whilst battling a Problem Blob and a Spooky Spoon. We’ve heard it all a thousand times before. The live stage show promised "all the fun, comedy, music and excitement from the TV, and lots lots more!". And it didn’t disappoint. Assuming your expectations were pretty low to start with.

Tickets for this theatrical extravaganza started at £12.50, but fortunately I'm on the mailing list for the Theatre Royal, meaning I was entitled to a special discounted price of just ten pounds a ticket. It meant we were able to purchase three £10 seats for a total of – yes, you've guessed it – forty pounds. I'm not saying they rip you off, but by the time you've paid the booking fee, service charge and 'restoration levy', you feel like calling Trading Standards.

But still, at least they gave Amelie a free booster cushion to sit on...

It's just a shame they charged us £2.50 for that ice cream.

Anyhoo, the show itself featured four enthusiastic young actors who'd probably spent three years at RADA and dreamt of doing Chekhov at the National, only to end up singing songs about numbers to a bunch of four-year-olds. I couldn't fault their performances, but I felt the material they'd been given was a bit thin. As was the production budget. The white stone castle on the right looked good...

... but sadly that was the scenery for Spamalot, which was on in the evening. The Numberjacks set was just stuck in front of it for the afternoon.

The performers gave it their all, and I'm sure the audience enjoyed it, but the production values left something to be desired. In the TV show, Spooky Spoon floats eerily around in the air. In the stage version, someone walks on looking like a cross between a ninja and a serial killer, and waves a pink spoon on a broom handle. It scared the life out of Amelie, who started shouting "Who's that??!" in a terrified voice. When I told her it was Spooky Spoon, she said "No, the scary man in black!".

Anyway, all credit to the actors for doing stirling work with limited resources, but frankly I knew they were in trouble half way through Act II, when Amelie turned to me with a glum expression and said "Daddy, this isn't very good". When three-year-olds start picking holes in the script, you know you've got problems.

All was not lost though. At the end of the show, the actors went offstage, only to return a few moments later wearing Santa hats for a performance of The Twelve Days of Christmas. The sight of the Numbertaker in festive headgear was the highlight of the show for Amelie, and proved that even in pitch darkness, it's always worth pointing a camera at her, on the offchance of comedy gold...

She's like Statler and Waldorf from The Muppets. And before you ask, no, the show wasn't a sell-out.

Having ended the performance on a high, we made our way outside to suffer the considerable low of a sleet downpour and a fifteen minute wait for the bus home. It gave Amelie just enough time to persuade me to spend five quid on a Mickey Mouse balloon from a street trader, after which she began a series of mini-tantrums at everything from our choice of bus seats to our audacity at daring to touch her balloon string. By the time we got home, I was soaked, Lisa was frozen, and Amelie had dissolved into tears. I thought things couldn't get any worse until I got up this morning and found that the £5 balloon had deflated overnight. I had to play the video above at full volume, just to give voice to my despair.

2011-12-18T18:32:00.004Z

With the death of Christopher Hitchens, there's clearly a gap in the market for someone who can explain the evolution of animals after the big bang in a simple, visual style...

The big girly scream from an unseen source was actually God quaking in his boots.

But enough about my heavenly father, the real star of this Christmas is my holy mother, whose birth we celebrated yesterday...

I'm not sure the Alvin Stardust impression is really working, but other than that, she looks good. For her age. Although if there's one thing she's missing, it's a balloon hat and a badge saying '3 Today'...

As it happens, Amelie was three yesterday. And is again today. As she will be, right up until October 2nd next year. She's getting her money's worth out of that badge.

Anyhoo, our day with the birthday girl yesterday was actually very nice. I'm not saying that Lisa brings out the worst in her daughter, but Amelie couldn't have been better behaved. Having warned my parents that she's going through a challenging phase and can be a bit of a nightmare, she was nothing but a little dream all day. Apart from the mini-tantrum she threw when she realised we'd forgotten the iPad.

Admittedly, she gave the game away by handing a carefully wrapped present to my Mum with the words "This is a jigsaw puzzle", but other than that, she behaved beautifully. Our second present is visible at the end of the video above. It's not the piano, it's the set of coasters featuring a picture of us at Blackpool Tower. They're only four inches square, but each coaster has room for three ugly mugs.

With the gifts presented, we asked the birthday girl what she wanted to do on her special day. And then ignored it, and went to the park instead...

Amelie's so like her mother.

On the way to the playground, my Mum told me the sad news that her next door neighbour had died, which produced a shocked response from Amelie, who mis-heard the information and wanted to know why her Grandma's daughter was dead. I think she was worried it might affect her haul of Christmas presents.

Having established the truth of the situation, Amelie was able to relax and enjoy an hour or so at the park, mingling with the natives of St Leonards. All of whom appeared to be from Eastern Europe, and unable to speak English. It's a shame we couldn't stay longer, as I was on the verge of getting us back into the EU treaty, but unfortunately Amelie's services were required back at my parents' bungalow...

Not only is she a veteran Christmas tree decorator, but she's also getting pretty damn good at climbing onto rickety chairs and over-reaching with a glass bauble in each hand and nothing but a few electrical cables to hold on to. It's a skill you can't teach. Well, not legally.

Having berated my parents for not having a star at the top of their tree (if that's not rectified by next week, there'll be trouble), Amelie selflessly agreed to share my Mum's birthday tea, and successfully polished off a Happy Meal followed by two bowls of fruit salad and ice cream. She then grabbed her party bag, filled it with a collection of stones, twigs and acorns, and the two of us headed home wearing big smiles. And balloon hats. The inflatable Chloe was a bonus.

2011-12-17T09:10:00.000Z

Lisa and I are on a break at the moment. Well, Lisa's on a break. From Amelie. For a day. It's been a tough week for Lisa. Not only has she been tirelessly spreading her germs around, but her mother refused to see her on Tuesday on the grounds that it was too windy. In addition to that, Amelie's dictionary is currently missing the word 'reasonable', and she'd test the patience of a Saint Bernard. Frankly, even I wouldn't rescue her from the snow.

So I've decided to give Lisa a break by taking Amelie off her hands for twenty-four hours. Obviously when you're on a break, you're allowed to see other people, so I'm taking her to visit her grandparents. It's actually my Mum's birthday. As of today, she's passed the Bible's official projection of longevity, so every day's a bonus, and she's lucky to be alive. Although she might not think so once Amelie starts playing up.

We're currently wrapping her present (I'm typing this while I wait for Am to come back with the sellotape), and in addition to the one we spent good money on, Amelie has just informed me that she'd like to wrap up one of her toys to give to her Grandma. She's chosen a small cuddly doll I bought her from a charity shop. It might seem like a selfless act of love, but in reality she's never liked it.

2011-12-15T19:47:00.000Z

I received two early Christmas presents today. The first was a bespoke, hand-decorated festive box which Amelie made for me at her playgroup Christmas party...

And the second was a stinking cold, given to me by Lisa. That's not holly on the box, it's snot.

2011-12-14T20:31:00.000Z

Amelie asked me yesterday what bears like to eat and drink. At the time, I said fresh fish and water, but that was before I saw this video...

Judging by the way that one's camping it up, I'd say it's probably sushi and a pina colada.

But gay bears aside, I signed up for an NHSmail account today, which is a high security, encrypted e-mail system which allows healthcare professionals to gossip about patients without it ending up in the tabloids. I don't actually have anything exciting to say about it (except that it allows me to send free text messages, which is going to be hard to resist), but having been accepted onto the system, it presented me with this picture...

I love that logo almost as much as I love the camp waving bear. If anyone deserves a better pension, it's the graphic designer who produced it.

But in the meantime, my favourite patient of the day was a foreign chap who I screened exactly twelve months ago. I only know that from the computer records, but he knew it from memory alone. He walked into the room with the words "Me again!", and within five minutes was asking me if I thought his English had improved in the year since we last met. I didn't like to tell him that I can barely recall a patient's face ten minutes after giving them the eye drops, never mind judging the progress of their language skills over a twelve month period. So rather than risk hurting the man's feelings by admitting that I didn't know him from Adam, I simply smiled, shrugged, and pretended I couldn't understand a bloody word he said.

2011-12-13T20:08:00.002Z

Having taken advantage of my mother-in-law's free baby-sitting service on Saturday, I returned the favour last night by taking her on a luxury shopping trip to Asda. She needed a few things for Christmas, and I needed to keep on the right side of Lisa, so the deal suited us both. Unfortunately, having driven her to the nuts and crackers, and watched her go off her trolley for an hour, I feel strangely tired today. It's slightly exhausting trying to persuade a 77-year-old on a state pension that she doesn't really need to spend thirteen quid on a bottle of vodka for the lady who cleans her sheltered housing block.

That was an argument I lost. So in the absence of anything more energetic to say, here's a photo I took first thing in the morning from the window of our living room...

It was actually last Wednesday. This morning I couldn't stand upright for the wind.

2011-12-12T17:37:00.000Z

The X Factor Final last night was eye-opening for a number of different reasons. Louis Walsh's hair being just one. For a start it proved that Lisa's ability to predict the winners of TV reality shows is about as concrete as Amelie's hopes of space travel. Having bet me a pound that Aaron wouldn't win Big Brother, she wagered another ten quid that Dougie would lose I'm a Celebrity, and yet was still willing to make a bet with me last night that Marcus would be crowned the X Factor champion. It was like taking candy from a baby. Obviously I didn't think Little Mix would win, but the moment Lisa declared them the losers, I knew I had it in the bag.

The more startling news, however, was the revelation that the winners' first single will be the song ‘Cannonball’ by Damien Rice. Startling, because it's the song we had playing at the hospital when Lisa gave birth to Amelie. It was particularly appropriate, because as Damien sang the line "it's not hard to fall when you float like a cannonball", Lisa was sinking below the surface of the birthing pool.

We served up another portion of Rice on our wedding day, by walking into the registry office to the sound of ‘The Blower's Daughter’, so that album's been with us at every important milestone in our relationship. I plan to put it on in the background when Amelie tells us she's pregnant at 15. So it was something of a shock to hear one of 'our songs' being belted out at Wembley Arena (complete with electronic drums and obligatory key change) by the latest X Factor starlets. I feel slightly soiled.

But on the subject of being soiled by starlets, the breaking news from our living room is that the carpet around our Christmas tree is now littered with fallen stars. I was in the kitchen yesterday afternoon when Amelie walked in and told me that she needed her snippy scissors because her puppies wanted her to make balloons for them. I forget my exact response, but it was something along the lines of ‘Yeah, whatever’.

She's owned a pair of scissors for a few months now, mainly to give her something to hold as she goes running down the hallway. She uses them to cut sheets of paper (mostly shopping lists and work rotas) into small pieces to make pictures for her grandparents. To my knowledge, she's never used them to make balloons for small dogs, but I tend to accept anything she says due to a combination of exhaustion and apathy, so I did as I was told, fetched her scissors from the high shelf, and went back to making a cup of tea. Five minutes later, I walked into the living room to find her cutting all the stars off the Christmas tinsel, whilst saying “Snippy snip snip! There you go, puppies!”. They were slightly more pleased than I was.

So while Lisa got out the dustpan and brush, I punished Amelie by taking her to Lidl for half an hour. Unfortunately it wasn't quite the journey of drudgery I was expecting. On the way back, we met Nora, Harry and Finnegan, and quicker than you could say “There you go, puppies!”, Amelie was heading up the path with a dog on a lead...

I think I'll hire her out as a dog-walker, and buy myself a new mobile with a better camera.

2011-12-11T16:51:00.001Z

By the time I picked up Amelie from my mother-in-law's yesterday afternoon, the moon was already riding high in the sky (much like Amelie on my shoulders), so as we walked from the car to our block of flats, she began telling me of her long term ambitions to join the European Space Programme. Well, what she actually said was "When I'm older, I want to fly through the sky to the moon - wheeeeeeee!", but it amounts to the same thing. It's pretty much what Big Sis wrote on her application form.

As we walked through the main door and into the swanky lobby of our apartment block, Amelie was expanding on her goals in life by telling me that having landed on the lunar surface, she wants to sit on the seashore and build castles out of moon sand. At which point we were followed into the lift by the chap mentioned in this headline.

Now, I'll generally chat to anyone, but it's not easy breaking the ice when you're trapped in a lift with a bloke you've only read about on the BBC news website. Fortunately I needn't have worried. As the lift doors closed, Amelie wondered aloud if there really is a seashore on the moon, to which our neighbour from the fifth floor immediately responded by telling her that there is, that it's called the Sea of Tranquility, but that you can't paddle in it.

It just goes to show that you shouldn't judge a book by its cover. Especially when the person in question looks as though they've never read one. It was probably him who threw out the book stack coffee table. By the time we reached the second floor, the three of us were firm friends, and I'd be willing to testify in court for him any day of the week. I already like him more than any of our other neighbours. Not that that's saying much.

On the subject of outward appearances, Amelie was playing Girl Story on the iPad this morning. It's an intellectually stimulating game where you have to dress your character in a variety of slutty outfits and then hang around in bars trying to pick up men. I don't think Lisa read the full description before downloading it. Anyway, Amelie was busy pressing the 'Flirt' button and getting nowhere fast with a bloke from I.T., so I advised her to go back to the wardrobe screen and choose something more revealing. At which point she suddenly shouted "Oh! She looks like Mummy!"

For anyone not familar with my wife, here's the screen in question...

Lisa's never been so chuffed.

2011-12-10T15:06:00.000Z

It was my works Christmas do last night...

I've cropped that photo, mainly so I won't get fired. Suffice it to say that no one parties like a retinal screener. Let's face it, if you spend all year saving people's sight, you're entitled to get blind drunk. Not that I did, obviously. I was too busy taking notes for the departmental newsletter. I'll be starting the blackmailing on Monday morning.

Anyhoo, Lisa's out this afternoon meeting a friend, and her Mum has kindly offered to mind Amelie for a couple of hours so that I can get on with a few important jobs. Like writing this blog post. She's in a good mood at the moment because she's had a couple of winners on the horses, so she's convinced she'd riding a wave of good fortune and is destined to scoop the triple rollover on the lottery tonight. I'm accepting any generous offers of childcare while I can, because by the time the draw takes place, she'll either be crushed by disappointment, or on the next plane to the Bahamas.

So having driven Lisa to Shoreham this afternoon, I headed straight to the nearest non-charitable emporium of high quality Christmas merchandise, and bought Amelie a new duvet set...

It cost more than all her charity shop presents combined, but her bedroom's like a pig sty, so it seemed quite appropriate.

2011-12-09T12:51:00.002Z

I took the morning off work yesterday to go Christmas shopping. Unfortunately, with the weather the way it was, my money wasn't the only thing in danger of being blown to kingdom come. There was also every chance I'd end up in Oz with a house on my head. So I decided against a whirlwind of Christmas shopping, and instead took Amelie to playgroup.

To be honest, I didn't really need to buy any gifts anyway. I got most of Amelie's presents during my lunch break in Haywards Heath on Wednesday. In just one sweep of the high street, I bought:

A Next skirt
A cuddly elephant
A cuddly antelope in a dress (no, really)
A furry Christmas stocking with built-in reindeer
The Very Hungry Caterpillar Giant Floor Puzzle
Buckaroo

I'm particularly excited about that last one. Amelie won't get a look in on Christmas Day.

Anyhoo, the six items above cost me a grand total of £6.45. That's about a quarter to heaven. You've gotta love charity shops. When you add to that the big cuddly Garfield I bought for a quid a couple of weeks ago, I've basically got Amelie's Christmas sorted for well under a tenner.

Or I would have done if Lisa would let me. Despite having saved us a fortune by picking up some genuine bargains (some of which don't even need cleaning), Lisa's insisting that it would be morally wrong for me to spend so little on my daughter at Christmas. I think it's because her Mum's given us twenty quid to get Amelie something nice, and she's worried we'll end up in profit.

So I may be forced to head back to the shops for something more expensive. And having spent yesterday morning with Amelie at playgroup, I think she might want a few dressing-up outfits...

That's Dr Amelie flouting the NHS infection control rules by wearing a long-sleeved jacket. The blur in the background is Snow White running for the alcohol hand gel. Oh, and I admit it - I gave her the 99p elephant three weeks early.

Having practised a few of her old knock-knock jokes, we then moved on from doctors to princesses...

That's one for the royal wedding commemorative plate. But my favourite was the cat costume...

I'm not sure what's going on with her front paw. Either she's lost a claw in a cat-fight, or she's hoping to join the Masons.

2011-12-08T09:10:00.001Z

We received our first Christmas card of 2011 yesterday (apart from the ones we got in January, obviously). Now, I'm not saying that Royal Mail has problems, employs illiterates, and provides marginally worse service than an overloaded donkey with arthritis. I'm really not saying that. But when our daily delivery arrived promptly at lunchtime yesterday, this was amongst it:

Our name isn't Ward, we don't live in Chatburn Close, I've not heard of Great Harwood, and we've never been to Blackburn. But apart from that, there's every chance it could be us.

Interestingly, it was posted in Lancashire, which - and correct me if I'm wrong here - is where Blackburn is situated. And yet, when confronted with an envelope without a postcode, the staff down the road at the South Lakes sorting office thought it more likely to be destined for Brighton. A simple mistake, which could possibly have been avoided by handing it to someone who can read. Presumably no such person was available. They probably saw the name 'Ward', thought of 'hospital', and forwarded it straight to me.

Fortunately I've taken on a bit of unpaid voluntary work this Christmas, done Royal Mail's job for them, and entered the address into Google. The postcode should be BB6 7TL, and the house in question looks like this:

They've even left the front door open. I expect they're looking out for the postman.

2011-12-07T07:36:00.001Z

It's a well known fact that Amelie comes from a long and distinguished line of master magicians, stretching all the way back to her grandfather. So it was only a matter of time before I filmed her getting up to her old tricks...

She's like Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee rolled into one. Only taller, lovelier, and with all her own hair.

2011-12-05T18:38:00.000Z

The block of flats where we live has a communal rubbish area downstairs. It's a council block, so to be honest, it has quite a few rubbish areas, most notably the inside of the lift, which frequently radiates with the kind of smell you don't really wish to know the origin of. But its one official rubbish area is the bin room downstairs.

When Lisa's mother used to live here, she was fond of telling me that you could furnish an entire flat from the items you find discarded down there, and having been here for a year and a half, I'm inclined to agree. The portable TV with built in DVD player which resides in Amelie's bedroom and pumps out Pingu for six hours a day was discovered lying on the floor down there, complete with remote control, about a year ago, and is still going strong today. There's currently a nice Moses basket sitting down there too (baby not included) if you want one. But yesterday afternoon I found this...

When I saw it standing in the corner, I genuinely thought it was a stack of old books. But when I went to open the top one, I found this...

It's actually a coffee table, with a storage compartment in the top. Sadly I don't drink coffee, and I don't read much either, but I do like getting stuff for free, so I salvaged it from the rubbish dump, cleaned it up a bit, and hey presto, I've got Big Sis's Christmas present.

I'm joking of course. It's far too good for Big Sis. I'll be keeping it for myself.

2011-12-04T15:34:00.001Z

When you've just put your heart and soul (and a large amount of glitter) into the creation of a hand-painted Christmas tree decoration, you obviously need somewhere to hang it. So having spent the morning playing fayre at the nursery, Amelie and I settled down in the afternoon to prepare the flat for the festive season.

I'd already laid the groundwork by visiting Poundland for a load of tinsel, but you can't scrimp when it comes to baubles, so we'd gone upmarket and sourced those from Asda. After lunch, I visited the storage cupboard downstairs and retrieved our authentically pink tree (which simultaneously reminds us of Christmas time and breast cancer), and having put it together, Santa and his little helper began the job of decorating...

The first item to go on the tree was Amelie's hand-made decoration, which she declared to be "the most beautiful bauble in the world". Modesty never was her strong point. But having completed the lower branches of the family tree, it was time to throw the health & safety rulebook out the window, and get a bit more upwardly mobile...

It wasn't long before I realised that I had the potential to pay for Christmas 2011 with a £250 cheque from 'You've Been Framed', so I switched to video, in the hope of seeing Amelie fall off the chair and follow the route of the health & safety rulebook by taking the tree through the balcony window...

Sadly it didn't happen, so it's back to the credit card for another year.

With the Christmas tree done and dusted, Amelie moved on to the mirror...

She was already there, admiring her tiger face, so it didn't take much effort.

As the sun went down, the curtains were drawn and the lights came on, allowing us to admire the fruits of our labour...

What it lacks in symmetry at the bottom, it more than makes up for with cheap tinsel and plastic baubles. It's a triumph of Poundland style over upmarket substance.

It was a productive afternoon, and naturally with such an outstanding display of teamwork taking place, a bit of father-daughter bonding was inevitable. So with the living room successfully transformed into the Lidl Santa's grotto, the two of us sank onto the sofa, where Amelie spent the evening gazing lovingly into my eyes...

I feel like I'm being stared out by Bluebeard the Pirate.

2011-12-03T18:15:00.002Z

Amelie woke up in the middle of last night, calling for her Mummy. Which was handy, as her Daddy didn't want to get out of bed. So I shoved Lisa out from under the duvet, and she duly headed off into Am's room to find out what all the fuss was about. When she got there, Amelie sat up in bed and said "Mummy, I need to talk to you about something".

Concerned that our daughter might be sick with worry about an important and troubling issue which was keeping her awake at 3am, Lisa asked what was on her mind. To which Amelie replied "Tigers. I don't know what they eat and drink".

Personally I'd have said "Toddlers who won't go to sleep", but as it transpired, there was no need to enter into detailed discussions in the middle of the night, because just eight hours later, she was solving the mystery for herself...

The answer's cake. And lots of it.

Amelie's due to start at the hospital nursery in January (three afternoons a week - we're not made of money), and they were holding a Christmas Fayre this morning, so with a month to go until her settling-in sessions, we decided to give the girl a head start by paying them a visit and having a nose around. It turned out to be well worth the trip. Amelie painted her own plaster of Paris Christmas tree decoration, had her face painted, acquired a temporary tattoo and won a prize in the tombola, while Lisa and I spoke to the staff, and checked out the facilities.

We were both very impressed, so frankly we can't wait for them to take Amelie off our hands next year. She feels much the same way. And I'm sure that excitement will continue... right up until she gets there in January and realises that the giant table full of cupcakes isn't a permanent fixture.

2011-12-02T18:08:00.001Z

It's a little known fact that as a young boy, I was a kind of Billy Elliot figure around the council estates of Basildon. I was no good at dancing, but I was quite into Spandau Ballet. As a result, I never really warmed to those wild boys from Duran Duran. Although, as I confessed to Lisa on Wednesday night, I did once buy 'The Reflex' on 7" single and record it onto cassette for a ten-year-old girl I had my eye on. It was 1984, so I could do that without appearing on the sex offenders register.

Lisa, on the other hand, spent her formative years eschewing school work in favour of sitting at the back of the class, compiling height charts to compare the stature of Simon Le Bon with Nick Rhodes. And as Simon is pointing out here, Nick is only this tall...

He's also being stalked by a dodgy looking bloke who appears to be creeping up behind him as he plays the keyboards. I think it's Ed Miliband.

So since accepting Lisa warts and all (I had that written into our wedding vows), I've been forced to embrace the music of Duran Duran, and I have to say that as of Wednesday night, I think they've finally won me over. We did go and see them in Birmingham in 2005, but to be honest, I was more taken by Daniel Bedingfield than Simon Le Bon, so they didn't leave a big impression.

Wednesday in Brighton, however, was a different kettle of fish. The support act was called Cocknbullkid, so I was half expecting to see Bedingfield again, but it turned out to be a young black girl named Anita. She was very good, but the main improvement was in the headline act. It might feel like there are precious few jobs out there for young people nowadays, but Duran Duran have clearly been taking on new staff. They were only three short of a football team on Wednesday...

With an extra percussionist, saxophonist and backing singer, plus a new guitarist who could knock Andy Taylor into a cocked hat, they sounded a lot better. I was genuinely impressed.

On the downside, they were encouraging people to tweet during the evening, and displaying the messages on a big screen behind the stage, which seemed slightly pointless, and merely enabled the younger members of the audience to share their inanity with the rest of us. I could have done without hearing the views of the girls with the flashing bunny ears.

The same goes for Simon Le Bon's thoughts on the global financial crisis. When we saw Duran Duran six years ago, Simon paused between songs to adopt an expression of meek humility and declare that he was responsible for ending the war in Iraq. This time he introduced the song 'Ordinary World' by reflecting on the day's public sector strikes, and telling us that these are tough financial times, and we're all in it together. Which might have gone down better, had we not just paid him fifty quid each for our tickets.

I didn't think much of his Movember efforts either...

Beards are strictly against the rules. The man can definitely sing though. He just needs to stick to that, and not talk.

2011-12-01T12:34:00.000Z

It's the first of December, which can mean only two things: Amelie's opened the first door on her advent calendar...

... and I no longer have a moustache...

The only hairs on my top lip now are the ones coming out of my nose.

2011-11-30T17:10:00.001Z

Down at the Brighton registry office, another happy couple from Kemptown are enjoying their civil ceremony...

That was well worth crossing the picket line for. It gives new meaning to the phrase 'one out, all out'.

Anyhoo, I've spent today striking a pose, being a scab (and resisting the urge to picket), whilst camping it up around the hospital in a big moustache. I might end up with very little pension, but at least I've got some photos to comfort me in my old age.

By this time tomorrow, the facial hair will be gone, but the good news is that I have one last chance to show it off in public. And I don't mean my dentist's appointment tomorrow morning. It's exactly six months since Simon Le Bon phoned in sick and refused to sing for our anniversary at the Brighton Centre, but having given himself half a year to recover, the laryngitis he had in May has finally cleared up, his voice is back to normal, and Duran Duran will be taking to the stage tonight. So Lisa and I are off to celebrate seven years as a couple - quick, before we've been together eight.

2011-11-29T20:37:00.003Z

I had my seasonal flu jab from the occupational health nurse this morning in an attempt to protect me from all the virally infected patients marauding like zombies across Sussex this winter. I read the list of possible side-effects, which made me feel quite ill, so I spent ten minutes having a nice sit-down in the department before returning to work. When I eventually did, I started experiencing occasional sharp pains in the top of my arm, and was beginning to think that she'd given me less of a jab and more of an uppercut. Until ten minutes later, when I realised she'd just trapped a few hairs under the plaster.

On the subject of hair-related traumas, tomorrow's the last day of Movember, so before we wave ta-ta to the taches, my boss has organised a photo shoot for me and him with one of the medical photographers. It'll be the first time they've documented insanity. And might make them wish they'd gone on strike. But as it happens, it won't be as unusual as the photo shoot I had this afternoon...

I was about to take the retinal photographs of a young woman today, when her baby, which was lying in a buggy at the side, started crying. Personally I have the God-given ability to happily ignore a crying child for a good half hour, and was about to say "Don't worry, this will only take a minute..." when she surprised me by picking up the baby, pulling up her top, and telling me to carry on while she did a bit of breast-feeding. Before I knew it, I was taking the photos of a topless woman while her child helped himself to a drink. I didn't know whether to grade the photos as R2 or Page 3.

But I successfully focused on her eyes and nothing else, and having completed the screening with no screaming, she asked me if I could give her any kind of result. So I said yes: judging by the way he was grabbing the camera while I was taking the pictures, the baby's motor skills are developing nicely.

2011-11-27T14:49:00.003Z

If there's one thing I've learnt from more than nine years of blogging, it's that Mulled Whines wouldn't be half the blog it is without regular updates from my sister. In the past four years alone, she's...

I could have chosen any number of links for that last one.

But I think this time she's surpassed even her own highly comic standards. She texted me last weekend to say that she was busy shooting a film with the bloke from Harry Potter. I said "Daniel Radcliffe?", she said "Who?", and we left it at that.

It transpired, however, that a friend of hers had been charged (possibly in a criminal sense) with producing a series of training videos for a chain of care homes, and was looking for talented young actors to play the roles of the residents. When he failed to find any, he called Big Sis, and having offered her sixty quid to go mental, she was straight down the M4 towards London to put a bit of method into madness by acting the part of a patient.

Her co-star turned out to be an experienced actor who'd done the walk-throughs for three Harry Potter films. If you're not sure what a walk-through is, it's like a walk-on, but with less screen time. Think 'Extras' but without the fame. As Sis said to me at the time, via a message from the movie set, "My role is a self-harming, agitated patient in a care home". I told her that sounded well within her capabilities.

Principal photography took only four hours, but for a method actor like Sis, the resulting pain can last a lifetime. She texted me on the Friday night with these hauntingly evocative words:

"My finger has teeth marks in it and hurts after today's episodes!"

It was the same for Leonardo DiCaprio in 'What's Eating Gilbert Grape'. Except he didn't have to spend his entire fee on petrol to get home.

Anyway, having heard the glowing reviews from the film set, I've naturally been anxious (but not as anxious as Big Sis's character) to see the resulting footage. So it was with great excitement that we returned home from Shoreham yesterday afternoon to find an e-mail from Sis with a link to the first clip of her burgeoning movie career. And here it is. You might want to put your hand over your face before clicking on 'play'...

It's a focused and powerful performance. Not from Sis, obviously, but from the bloke at the front. Let's face it, it can't be easy ignoring what's going on behind him. I'd have been wetting myself laughing.

Within an hour of receiving that clip, we'd watched it a dozen times (mostly through our fingers), and managed to compose ourselves sufficiently to regain the power of speech. At which point Lisa said "I'm glad my sister's never done anything like that". I've told Sis they can put that on the film poster.

With our levels of hysteria down to a manageable level, Lisa then went out for the evening, leaving Amelie and I alone to create our own powerful version of a modern movie classic...

It may not have the biting impact of the original, but it was recorded in one take and with no rehearsals. So they probably have that in common.

After watching her all-encompassing performance, you might think that there's nowhere left to go with that character, but according to Sis, there are three more episodes to come. We can only imagine what they might contain. Having seen the way she captured the subtle nuances of mental illness, I've told Sis I won't be happy unless she blacks up and comes rolling on in a wheelchair.

2011-11-26T21:47:00.003Z

The trouble with young people today is that they're all getting their hair cut like Justin Bieber...

I found out today that I'm three years older than Justin Bieber's mother. It's the kind of news that makes you feel like sinking into a wingback chair with a bag of Werther's Originals. And then slashing your wrists.

But that aside, I've been looking after Amelie this evening while Lisa goes out to meet a friend. So I barely have the strength left to write this. Naturally I wanted to do my best to entertain the girl and stimulate her mind with some creative father-daughter bonding activites, so the moment Lisa left, I cleared the dining table, laid out an array of craft materials, and set about showing her how to make her own Christmas decorations. At which point she turned to me and said "I'm bored without Mummy". I wouldn't mind, but she'd only been gone about ten minutes.

Up until that point, however, she'd had a good day. We took Amelie over to Portslade at lunchtime to visit the all-new Outshine Hair & Beauty salon. It's recently been opened by Shelly, who, after sixteen years of being stalked by Lisa across the hair salons of Brighton, has finally got her own place. It was well worth the trip too, because in addition to being good with Amelie, she gives Lisa free lattes, and doesn't laugh at my moustache. Which must be hard for a haircare professional.

From Portslade, we moved on to Shoreham, and the Holmbush shopping centre, where Amelie found herself in the same boat as Igglepiggle...

They both have peculiar smiles. But only one of them looks like the Nike swoosh.

She enjoyed the 50p boat ride, but it was really just her way of softening me up for the £1.50 I had to fork out for her to climb the stairway to heaven...

... and spend ten minutes on top of the world...

Just look at that big Goofy face. Still, at least her hair looks good.

Anyhoo, if there's one thing that Isaac Newton proved about giant inflatable slides, it's that what goes up, must come down...

I'm not saying she was fast, but I think my £1.50 for ten minutes worked out at a cost of 5p per slide. The irony is that Lisa spent the whole time in Marks & Spencer's. Bored without Mummy, my foot.

2011-11-25T14:14:00.000Z

After twenty-five days of hair-raising charity work, I've finally been asked by a patient if I'm growing this moustache for Movember. Up to now, it's been debatable whether or not I'm raising money for a good cause or simply attempting a bit of seventies retro chic, but clearly after three and a half weeks, there's no longer any doubt. No one would choose to look like this.

He was very polite though, and insisted that the moustache suits me. Which I think was his way of avoiding having to give me any sponsorship money.

On the subject of facial disfigurement, the good news is that Amelie's disease-ridden features are clearing up fast. Since being diagnosed on Wednesday, she's been sleeping much better, so it was clearly the worry of not knowing what was wrong with her that was keeping her awake. She's had two good nights now, and as of this morning, her spots are fading fast.

She must be feeling better too, because she appears to have retaken her position as head of this household. Lisa was using the computer yesterday and Amelie asked her to stop and do something else. When Lisa didn't immediately drop everything and let go of the mouse, Amelie walked up to her and said in a calm, yet deeply authoritative voice, "Don't touch that again or I'll throw water over you". She's also started using the phrase "For goodness sake", and regularly tells me off for deleting her iPad games to free up a bit of space. Only last night, she put her hands on her hips, tutted loudly, and said "Daddy! You deleted this game! You thought I wouldn't notice!" with a withering look on her face. I'm getting to the point where I'm terrified to cross her.

So in an attempt to earn some forgiveness for my transgressions, I took her out last night to Lidl. She's obsessed at the moment with the idea of 'going out in the dark', so I'm forced to take her out for a moonlit ride on my shoulders on an almost daily basis. Yesterday's walk took us to Lidl, and turned out to be a journey of discovery, because we found that they're selling these...

Yes, I kid you not, Lidl are selling frozen moose legs for £9.99. The moment I saw them, I thought bloody elk, that's deer. I mean, let's face it, I'm willing to pay a fiver for their ostrich steaks and octopus, but a tenner for a leg of moose seems a bit excessive. They should have done a promotional tie-in with The Rocky & Bullwinkle Show to boost sales and bring down the price. I'm sure they're not averse to selling squirrel steaks too.

In the end, we decided against the frozen moose, but the good news is that I have now started my Christmas shopping. It was my Dad's birthday yesterday (I can't believe he's still alive), and in addition to buying him a high quality second-hand gift from a charity shop, I've also sourced a remarkably fine present for my Mum. It's a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle (she asked for one, I swear) and it features this delightful piece of information on the bottom of the box:

So it's not a toy. And it's not a 1,000 piece jigsaw. But it was cheap.

2011-11-23T17:44:00.001Z

It's typical. Just when I'm successfully attracting sympathy with an achy breaky prostate and a splitting headache, Amelie steals all my limelight by going down with the plague.

We noticed a couple of days ago that she was developing spots in various places (mostly in her bedroom), but by yesterday morning they were appearing on her hands and feet, and looking like tiny blisters, which seemed a bit odd. So Lisa took her to the doctor today for a spot check. And the result is...

She has 'Hand, Foot and Mouth Disease'. It's a viral infection, and should clear up within ten days. But if not, we have to burn her in a field on a bonfire of cows.

2011-11-22T18:02:00.002Z

Yesterday's blog post was actually written on Sunday evening, which is just as well, because by Monday morning, we'd had the night of the living dead and I felt like calling it a day. Not only did Amelie wake us up numerous times with big cries in the small hours, but I was struck down at 4am with a recurrence of my chronic prostatitis. I struggled into work (late, and with an overgrown moustache), but by mid morning I was suffering with a splitting headache, and feeling inclined to throw up over a retinal photograph.

So I came home early, in the hope of being well enough to rush myself into hospital this morning. Horsham Hospital, to be exact. I still feel a bit rough, but I did indeed make it up the A23 today, and carry out a clinic without being carried out on a stretcher. I soaked my moustache in soluble aspirin, so I could get a hit just by licking my lips. It seemed to get me through the day.

The good news, however, is that I'm now in a position to self-medicate with super-fruit. Having spent Saturday afternoon at Raystede, mingling with some dodgy looking animals from broken homes, I decided to spend the evening hanging out at Asda. It's basically the same, but with less chance of being rescued. So I was vegetating in the fruit aisle, when I noticed that they were selling boxes of four pomegranates for three quid, with one of these thrown in for free...

That's an Arils Removal Tool, and you wouldn't guess it from the photo, but it was the winner of the Fruit Logistica Innovation Award 2010. No, really. I must admit, I assumed 'Arils' was the brand name until I looked it up in the dictionary.

Anyhoo, it's a well known fact that I'm the biggest pomegranate fan since Persephone, but tragically I'm forced to buy the seeds in plastic sealed cartons due to an inbuilt inability to get them out of the fruit. Trust me, I've tried. But as the juice stains on my shirts will testify, I've met with limited success. So every week I buy the pre-packed trays at great expense and even greater personal risk. They have a habit of fermenting within five days, swelling up the carton, and exploding all over the fridge. Although some of my most intense moments of clarity have come after eating them.

So what I've been wanting all these years is a foolproof method of getting the arils out of the husk. And now, at last, Asda have given me one for free...

Looks great, doesn't it? Unfortunately the reality bears very little resemblence to the video. I was there for half an hour last night playing some kind of crazed game of Whack-a-Mole with a pomegranate. Either you tap it politely and get nothing, or you beat the living daylights out of the fruit and end up taking the pith. I think I'll save it for Red Nose Day and stick it on the front of my car.

2011-11-21T08:32:00.000Z

Lisa discovered a 'Height Predictor' tool on the internet at the weekend, which uses the scientifically proven Khamis-Roche Method to accurately reveal how tall your children will be as adults. So we entered my height (5'7") and Lisa's height (5'5"), plus Amelie's height (3'6"), weight (42lb) and age (3), and having analysed all the data, it told us she'll be 5'9" by the age of 13. We've only got ten years before she'll be looking down on us. Although in many ways, I think she already is.

So while we're still able to look her in the eye without the use of a stepladder, we decided to take her out for some fun in the sun on Saturday. We'd had a slightly stressful morning, after I had a flash of inspiration and decided on the spur of the moment that what Amelie would enjoy more than anything on a bright November morning, was for me to get out my old PS2 dance mat from under the bed, and for the two of us to boogie on down in the living room for a couple of hours.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. The time being 10am. By ten-fifteen I'd realised that the dance mat wasn't where I thought it would be, and by ten-thirty I was turning the flat upside down looking for it. I eventually found it at eleven. And that wasn't all I found. I also discovered that if your Playstation's done nothing but gather dust on a shelf for two years, you might struggle to get it working.

But two hours, numerous tears and a lot of regrets later, we were finally up and dancing. At which point Amelie took one look at the game, told me she didn't like it, and ran out of the room crying. To say it was a disappointing end to all my hard work would be like saying that Burlesconi was only slightly corrupt.

But what really gets my goat is this...

That's Amelie having a lot more fun with a lot less effort from me.

We decided to take her out on Saturday afternoon to the Raystede Centre for Animal Welfare near Ringmer. We took her there in June, when we pretended it was Drusillas Zoo Park, but we decided to come clean this time and admit that it's an animal rescue centre. Unfortunately she associates the word 'rescue' with me retrieving her cuddly toys from behind the sofa, so she spent most of the time asking why the animals were stuck, and how we could pull them out.

But despite the confusion, a good time was had by all. Not only did we manage to cross the wooden bridge to Goose Island with no more than two or three tantrums...

... but we also saw a variety of interesting animals. Here's a hot bunny girl having a bad hair day...

Sorry, wrong photo. That's my wife with no make-up in the cafe. Here's a hot bunny girl having a bad hair day...

Or possibly a bad hare day. Surprisingly, however, that wasn't the oddest small mammal we saw on Saturday. Raystede has become so overrun with rodents since we last visited, that they're on the verge of being sponsored by Rentokil. But in addition to rehoming rats, hamsters, gerbils, chinchillas and spiny mice, they also had two destitute degus. Although they looked more like obese gerbils.

Not only is the degu an ideal pet, but you can have a lot of fun with them in the lab. According to Wikipedia (so it's bound to be true), "Degus entered the research spotlight due to their unique relationship with sugar and diabetes, but are also studied for a wide variety of other reasons. Neuroscientists at the Riken Institute in Tokyo, Japan, used degus for research into tool use in animals with good eye-and-paw coordination, in which they spontaneously learned to use a tiny rake to retrieve out-of-reach seeds. Degus have also been found to spontaneously stack objects in order of decreasing size. In both cases it is the first time these behaviours have been recorded in animals other than apes and birds."

They're naturally diabetic, can use gardening tools, and appear to have OCD. Lisa had to physically restrain me from adopting one. I'd have it cuddling my patients, sorting out my window box, and alphabetising my CDs within hours.

2011-11-20T12:08:00.001Z

I don't know how I'm going to find the time to write a blog post if I spend all weekend doing stuff with Amelie, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it...

I'm not alone in that photo. Amelie's behind me, playing Poohsticks. On a lake.

2011-11-18T19:38:00.000Z

I think three years spent listening to her decrepit old parents moaning about their minor ailments has finally had an effect on Amelie. She walked into the kitchen this morning and said this:

"Mummy, my knees are a bit achey. Can I have a cuddle?"

Mind you, she needs a lot of reassurance at the moment, because as of two days ago, she's officially ugly. I forgot to say that The Argus announced the winners of the Cute Kids Contest on Wednesday, and sadly, Amelie didn't quite make the grade. Her category was won by a little girl called Cheska, but according to the report, the most votes were polled by the winner in the 1-2 years category, a girl called Summer (she sounds like a seasoned professional), who racked up 334 texts.

Apparently there were 14,100 votes cast in total, and 1,100 children who entered, so ignoring the Summer loving which happened so fast, I make that an average of only 12 votes per child. Frankly if we hadn't lost touch with Lisa's father's side of the family, we could have won this thing.

But on the subject of things I've forgotten to say, I went for a little walk in Crawley at lunchtime yesterday, and discovered a new Indian Takeaway called Argy Bhaji. It's shop names like that which make my life worth living. I wanted to take a photo, but tragically, it's positioned right next door to a sex shop (that wasn't why I was in the area, I swear), and I was terrified that a customer would emerge just as I pressed the shutter release button, and I'd end up being accused of trying to take pictures of porn purchasers. So I didn't dare get out my camera.

But fortunately, I've found a photo online...

That's Xes Desire on the right. It's for people who are a bit backwards about sex. At least in terms of the spelling.

2011-11-17T18:03:00.002Z

I was listening to the radio news on my way up to Crawley this morning, and they were talking about the fact that gourmet sea salt is apparently no better for you than bog standard table salt. The only difference you get with the expensive brands is that you'll end up with less money to spend on your blood pressure pills.

So I was pondering this news as I drove up the A23, only to exit at the Crawley turn-off and find myself driving up the slip road directly behind a car with this registration plate:

S99 SLT

Is it just me, or is that slightly spooky? It was as though fate wanted me to see salt as well as hear about it.

Anyhoo, I don't want to give the impression that I spend all my time tirelessly raising money for charity, but in addition to the hours I've spent cultivating an impressive moustache (hair doesn't just grow itself, you know), I also raised a substantial sum for Children in Need today. The receptionists at Crawley Hospital were holding a home-made cake sale, which involved the clever use of a yellow sharps bin as a charity collecting bucket. I presume they wanted to prick people's conscience and make a worthwhile point. So I spent the day diligently raising money... out of my left trouser pocket, and handing it over in return for numerous baked goodies.

Obviously I'm on a strict diet, but they'd placed the cake table directly between my room and the waiting room, meaning that I had to spend the day trekking past sugar loaf mountain with a stream of diabetics. Under the circumstances, I felt the most selfless thing I could do was to help my patients avoid temptation by eating the evidence myself.

It was a rocky road. After which I had a chocolate brownie and some carrot cake. By the time I was eating the clotted cream sponge, I felt like I'd done my bit for a good cause. I'll be booking myself in for a diabetes test next week.

2011-11-16T19:56:00.000Z

I'm a bit busy this evening eating toast sandwiches, checking my salad for dead birds, and pondering what hamsters can teach us about adolescent sex. So I don't have much time to write a blog post.

But the good news is that Big Sis has e-mailed me the photos she took at Amelie's Christening the Sunday before last. So here's Lisa nailed to the cross...

And here are my brother and sister in Christ...

I know half my family are now Catholic, but that photo alone makes a pretty powerful argument for the use of contraception.

2011-11-15T19:01:00.007Z

Today is the halfway point in Movember, which means that in theory, my moustache will be twice as long as this by the end of the month. I find that slightly scary. Give it another fortnight and I might not be able to breathe.

But on the subject of charitable exploits, I was back in Burgess Hill today, so following on from the closely-guarded secrets revealed to me by the illuminati of the hospice world last Thursday, here's a round-up of the latest breaking news from the town's charity shops:

The teenager who works in the St Catherine's Hospice Shop is currently paying £275 for his car insurance. Which would be fine if that wasn't per month. It's costing him more than three thousand pounds a year. Which makes it all the more admirable that he's giving up his time for a charity. If it was me, I'd be out there robbing a bank. Let's face it, he's already got the getaway car.

On December 1st, the 'Safe Haven for Donkeys in the Holy Land' shop (which was presumably set up because Mary and Joseph nicked the stable) will be holding a late-night shopping evening featuring a personal appearance from none other than David Barby of 'Bargain Hunt' fame. I swear I'm not making this up.

The DebRA UK shop is closing down on Saturday because it's not making enough money. The manager only found out yesterday, and the bloke on the till is devastated because after fourteen years of volunteering at the shop, it means he might have to spend his days watching David Barby on Bargain Hunt. To be honest, I don't know if that's why he's devastated, but I do know why the shop isn't making a profit. It's the only charity shop in Burgess Hill which closes for an hour at lunchtime, meaning it's frequently shut when I walk past. I've kept the others afloat for the past three years, but if this one refuses to fit in with my working hours, there's not a lot I can do.

That's obviously a slightly depressing note to end on, but fortunately I have a far more positive piece of charity news up my sleeve. My Dad informs me that The Daily Telegraph has published a follow-up to last week's rib-tickling Movember-based cartoon strip. And here it is...

Who says that sequels are never as good as the original? That's at least as funny as the first one.

2011-11-14T18:40:00.004Z

I attended an infection control training session this morning which featured the key phrases "hacking your guts up" and "squitting through the eye of a needle". I felt like suggesting we all wash our mouths out afterwards, but fortunately the lecturer moved on to the subject of drinking alcohol hand gel, so it didn't seem necessary.

Having wiped down a few surfaces, I then followed that up with a health & safety lecture in which we were told, with no irony whatsoever, that the Trust is very hot on fire prevention. There was also a section on 'Safe Working at Height', which included this real-life scenario:

Here's the uncropped version:

When asked for a show of hands, I voted that to be bad practice, which I think qualifies me as competent to work for the NHS for another year.

On the subject of health & safety signs, I took this photo at the Clambers play centre yesterday afternoon...

I think I'll reframe that and put it on the wall.

Sadly, that was the only picture I took yesterday, as photography is banned within the confines of the play centre due to the ever present threat of paedophiles and child pornographers. They did, however, have comfy sofas and free wi-fi, so the two hours we spent there were not only relaxing, but quite productive. I spent the first hour on my laptop, completing various useful tasks, and the second on my hands and knees, climbing to the top of an assault course in my socks, while my daughter berated me from above.

There was a tense moment when Amelie swung to the other side of a cargo net on a giant plastic ball, only to fall off and ask me to rescue her. Something I found difficult to accomplish without admitting to her that I'm too scared of heights, and couldn't cross that net without a blindfold and three sessions of hypnotherapy. But ultimately a good time was had by all. I conquered my completely rational fear of bumpy slides, and despite being touched inappropriately by a two-year-old, Amelie seemed to enjoy herself.

From there, we dropped off our daughter at my parents, before driving home to begin our forty-eight hour date-night. Lisa's currently preparing a romantic home-cooked meal for me in the kitchen. She hasn't said what it is yet, but I'm guessing it's a Loyd Grossman Korma.

2011-11-13T13:52:00.002Z

I sat down last night and read all twenty-three pages of the Grand Jury indictment of Jerry Sandusky. I don't think the story's really making the news in the UK (although I can't be sure, because our TV's on CBeebies all day), but it's basically OJ Simpson for the new millennium. Wikipedia has a decent page on the subject if you need a bit of background.

Having read those twenty-three pages, I'm not sure what I find more shocking: the alleged child abuse, or the number of people who appear to have known about it for the past ten years. Probably the latter. I'd also like to know if there's anyone in the history of the entire universe who has ever set up "a charity to help troubled young boys" without having some kind of ulterior motive.

It seems that the only way American football legends can make a name for themselves outside the US is to be accused of a heinous crime. I'd never heard of OJ Simpson until he stabbed someone in the back (mostly the fans who looked up to him), and two days ago, I didn't know of Jerry Sandusky. Although I appear to be in the minority. A lot of people not only knew him, but knew what he was up to. He even named his 2001 autobiography 'Touched: The Jerry Sandusky Story', which as hints go, is not what you'd call subtle. They could have used the same title for the indictment.

Anyhoo, amidst all of that, the good news is that Lisa's Mum is feeling a bit better today and has now returned home. She won the TV turf war yesterday afternoon, so I think she wanted to quit while she was ahead. Amelie's due to go and stay with her other grandparents tonight, so Lisa and I are heading over to Hastings this afternoon, where we plan to sample the delights of the Clambers Play Centre, before dropping her off at my Mum's. We might have cancelled Friday night, but we'll be dating for the next two days.

2011-11-12T12:49:00.003Z

It's a well known fact that the best way to spice up a relationship is to invite another woman into your bed. So having identified the cracks in our marriage on Wednesday, Lisa and I applied the Polyfilla of love last night by having a threesome with the lady from the flats down the road.

About ten minutes after publishing yesterday's blog post and settling down for a date night with my wife, Lisa had a phone call from her mother. The woman hasn't been well for a week, which is how she managed to get out of coming to Amelie's christening. I've never been so jealous. We think it's probably just a heavy cold, but yesterday she was sick a couple of times, and by the evening she'd gone from Greta Garbo to Mae West, and felt less inclined to be alone.

So at 7:20pm, I cancelled our date and went up to see her. Five minutes later, I was bringing my mother-in-law back here with an overnight bag. It's not the most romantic way to spend an evening, but it seemed like the right thing to do. We made her sit through the Big Brother final, then she joined Lisa in the double bed while I slept in the living room. So it won't be me picking up her germs.

She'll probably be here all day, which means there'll shortly be a pitched battle in the living room between the rival fans of CBeebies and Channel 4 Racing, but in the meantime, I've retreated to the bedroom, from where I witnessed an exciting helicopter rescue of a body in the sea near Brighton Marina this morning...

Although you'll have to take my word for it, because frankly the video's rubbish.

2011-11-11T19:04:00.002Z

Lisa and I are planning another date night tonight, which is remarkable, firstly because she answered 'd' to one of the Relate questions, and secondly because I have the kind of moustache which makes the chances of female company unlikely.

But the good news is that I've stepped up the fundraising efforts today with the acquisition of a stylish charity collecting box. I requested it free from the Movember website last week, and it arrived in the post at lunchtime today, so I've stuck it in the department's kitchen at work.

You can't miss it, because not only is it twice the size I was expecting (my moustache is the same), but it features a brooding moustachioed model looking like a cross between Brad Pitt and Nick Cave, attempting to prove that facial hair can be sexy by luring would-be sponsors to the box with his smouldering good looks. Meaning that people are unlikely to associate it with me.

But I've countered that problem by taking a leaf out of the busker's book and cunningly putting all my loose change into the box (nothing bigger than a 10p, obviously) so that anyone giving it a casual shake will believe the donations are rolling in, and feel more inclined to follow suit. It was a plan with no drawbacks. Until I picked up the box, and the foldable bottom collapsed. My colleague had to patch it up with sellotape.

But despite those teething problems, I fully expect to be filling the fundraising hole left by Sir Jimmy Saville within a matter of days. On the downside, the colleague who said I looked French on Tuesday, now thinks I look like Mr Pastry...

I know facial hair makes you look older, but this is getting ridiculous.

2011-11-10T20:11:00.002Z

I think the days of charity shops being pokey little jumble sales staffed by clueless old ladies who don't know their Prada from their Primark, are long gone. I'm a regular disciple of the St Peter & St James Hospice shops ("... not just any charity shops!"), which are conveniently situated in four of the towns where I do clinics. They've been supplying Amelie with cheap cuddly toys for the past two years. Which is why there's no longer any space in her bedroom. Frankly I've donated so much money to that hospice, I think I'm single-handedly responsible for the rise in the pensioner population.

So I was in the Burgess Hill branch at lunchtime today, buying a new work shirt, and I witnessed a conversation between the shop manager and a bloke who'd popped in for advice from another charity shop nearby. Never mind clueless old codgers who can't work a till - this was like the final of The Apprentice crossed with an episode of Dragons Den. I haven't heard so much ingenious financial advice since Lisa told me to start buying Smart Price bin bags.

Obviously I'll take most of the secrets I heard to my grave (or my hospice at the very least), but I'll reveal one golden nugget of insider information here. Apparently the secret to raising substantial quantities of cash for a good cause is a website called China Search. It might sound like a communist version of Google, but it's actually a site where you can buy odd pieces of discontinued china plates, bowls and cups.

Apparently it's a common occurrence for people to donate incomplete dinner services or tea sets to charity shops. The high quality ones would be worth a fortune if complete, but the value takes a severe denting if not, or if one of the pieces is damaged. So rather than selling the incomplete set for, say, forty pounds, the charity goes straight onto China Search, buys the missing piece for a tenner, and then sells the complete set for a hundred and twenty. It's a genius idea, and I take my hat off to them. Or I would do if I wore one. I'm sticking to a balaclava until my moustache is gone.

On the subject of investing money in a worthwhile cause, tomorrow is the last day that you can vote for Amelie in the Argus Cute Kids competition. She's managed to avoid being booted out of the contest like Frankie Cocozza on the X Factor (although her behaviour's generally worse than his), so if you want to register your support for Brighton's other talent show wannabe with bad hair, the voting details are here.

2011-11-09T19:48:00.000Z

I was working in Haywards Heath today, which is always a bit difficult as it brings back memories of Black Monday, and gives me a panic attack every time my phone rings. To add to it all, there was an emergency dental clinic taking place down the corridor, so every time I managed to get teeth out of my head for five minutes, I bumped into someone who'd suffered that fate for real.

The room we occupy at the health centre is also used at times by Relate counsellors. It has a two-way mirror, which is handy if they want to move on from marriage guidance to dogging. There was no evidence of that when I arrived this morning, but I did find this new poster on the wall...

Naturally I took that as a direct order, and within minutes I was online and taking Relate's Heart to Heart health check. It's basically seven questions followed by the number of a good divorce lawyer. I answered them all truthfully and honestly, and duly received this result:

Congratulations - your relationship is looking very healthy indeed. Either you're still in the first throes of love or perhaps like many, you've discovered that relationships take time, commitment and open communication and you're reaping the rewards. The fact that you've done this quiz also demonstrates that you don't take your relationship for granted and you want to keep learning. If you want to make your relationship even better, have a look back through the questions to any where you didn't tick 'a' and consider what changes you and your partner might want to make.

I actually ticked 'a' to five of the seven questions, and 'b' to the other two. The answers marked 'd' feature statements such as "I don't feel very close to my partner and we rarely talk, except about essentials". So if you choose more than a couple of those, you might as well jack it all in and live the single life. Frankly I don't think I'd have ticked more than one 'd' if I'd been answering questions about my postman.

So feeling reassured that I have the perfect marriage, I e-mailed the link to Lisa and told her (in a non-controlling kind of way) to take the test. She replied an hour later to say that she'd ticked four 'a's, one 'b', one 'c' and - read it and weep - a 'd'. Frankly we haven't stopped arguing about it since. From the moment Relate congratulated us on our healthy relationship, we've been pretty much on the rocks.

2011-11-08T19:58:00.000Z

One of my colleagues told me today that my moustache makes me look French. I said "What, sexy and sophisticated?". She said "No, a bit dodgy".

So that's one less Christmas card to buy. Or two if you count Benjamin Netanyahu.

But just when I thought the only Movember-based comic strip was the amusing line of hair drawn across my face, this has appeared in The Daily Telegraph...

It's like a sketch from Comic Relief: not funny, but highlighting a good cause.

2011-11-07T18:01:00.000Z

I've now reached that difficult stage with my moustache where it's too long for people to think I've just missed a bit shaving, but not long enough for me to pass as Hans Moretti. It's gone beyond the point where anyone can think it's accidental, meaning that everyone knows I've made a conscious decision to look like this. I've spent today in clinic, fighting the urge to begin every patient encounter with the words "In case you're wondering, I don't think this is a good look."

But I shouldn't be embarrassed, because the good news is that I've just acquired a powerful new sponsor. I'm now being backed by God. After three years of downhill travel on the heathen road to hell, we had Amelie baptised yesterday at the local Catholic church. They had a two-for-one offer on, so we got Lisa confirmed as well. I'm now the only member of the family still allowed to use condoms.

To be honest, I'm not much of a God-botherer. I prefer to annoy Lisa. But I'm always happy to go along with her madcap schemes, and she was keen for at least two thirds of the family to get into heaven, so I agreed to do my bit by attending the service yesterday morning. We didn't manage to get any photos of the actual event, but here's Amelie recreating the crucial moment of baptism with a bowl of melted ice cream...

That's Lisa in the background, practicing her Catholic guilt.

The chance to see Amelie drowned in a font was obviously quite a big draw, so we were joined at the church yesterday by most of my family, half of Lisa's, and a couple of good friends. By the end of the service, there wasn't a dry eye in the house. Lisa's five-year-old nephew had been reduced to tears by the boredom, and frankly I was right there with him.

I got through the critical mass though, and despite being in a permanent state of bewilderment and confusion, I think I stood in all the right places, sung most of the right hymns, and managed to hold Amelie over the font without breaking her neck. I was expecting her to cry when the priest tipped water over her head, but instead she started laughing. She always did love baths. I'm just surprised she didn't ask for bubbles.

To be honest, I felt like a fish out of holy water for most of the morning, but the good news is, it didn't show. There were two priests present for the service, and Big Sis got chatting to one of them afterwards. He was asking about our family background, and when Sis said we weren't Catholic, he looked very surprised and said "Well, Phil certainly looks like a Catholic". I'm not sure if it's the moustache or the guilty expression, but either way, I've clearly got them fooled. I'll let you be the judge...

I think it's my look of easy virtue.

Anyhoo, you can't wet the baby's head without going for a celebratory meal afterwards, so having eaten a bit of cake in the church hall, we headed down to the Marina to share five loaves and two fishes with my family. We went for the authentic Roman Catholic experience by opting for an Italian restaurant, and then joined together to say 'Our Father'. But only when the waitress asked us who was paying the bill.

By the end of it all, I was ready to confess to the sin of gluttony, and had learnt a lot about brotherly love...

I think the church has a stranglehold on me already.

2011-11-06T10:20:00.000Z

You know those lazy Sunday mornings where you lounge about in your tatty old pyjamas? Well I think Amelie went to the wrong drawer...

But it doesn't need to stop you relaxing on the sofa with your iPad...

2011-11-05T14:27:00.005Z

It's Frankmusik doing Amelie's Baby Jake dance!

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking "Phil, where can I get a pair of trousers like that?". And the answer is, you can't. It's actually a jumper on upside down.

But dress sense aside, I have to say that I loved Frankmusik last night. He was well worth the two-and-a-half year wait. To be frank, his musik wasn't everyone's cup of tea though. When asked for her opinion, the person sitting on my right (who just happened to be Lisa) stated that she "couldn't see the point really". I must admit, he did have a habit of performing remixes of other people's songs, rather than just his own material, which Lisa felt was a bit pointless, but personally I found it all quite inventive. At one point he sang an entirely new melody over the backing track from 'Sweet Dreams' by the Eurythmics, which I thought was pretty cool.

But to be honest, he had no need to rely on other people's creations, because he's quite capable of writing a few catchy tunes of his own. I defy anyone to visit his MySpace page, listen to the song 'No ID', and not be tapping along by the end. I, for one, will definitely be buying his album. He announced at the start of his set that he's just been dropped by his record label, so I should be able to get it pretty cheap.

Frankmusik may have been a pleasant surprise, but to be honest, the biggest shock of the night came when he left the stage, the lights went up, and the person sitting immediately in front of me turned around and said hello. There were two thousand people there last night, and I'd managed to get tickets directly behind my old boss. So while we waited for Erasure to take the stage, I spent an enjoyable twenty minutes reminiscing with her about life at the hospital pharmacy, what everyone's up to now, and how we're both well out of it. She left a year after I did. Which I'm sure is no coincidence.

Interestingly, I chatted away for twenty minutes before remembering that I had a ridiculous moustache. She'd said nothing, so she clearly assumed I'd lost all sense of style and self-respect in the past two years and considered it to be a good look. When I realised, I was forced to tap her on the shoulder and insist that I was growing it for charity. I don't think she believed me. I was so embarrassed, I had to hide in the toilets for ten minutes until Erasure came on.

But it was worth the wait. Erasure might have got together before Frankmusik was even born (God, I feel old), but they can still belt out a good tune...

I think Andy Bell got a gym membership for Christmas. I haven't seen anyone so ripped since Amelie tore up a photo of Lisa. He spent the evening rippling across the stage like a set of snooker balls in a sausage skin. At one point, Vince had to cut him free from his corset with a pair of scissors, just so he could show off his six-pack.

To be honest, I think the role of Vince Clarke at an Erasure concert could pretty much be played by a mannequin in a jacket. He spent 90% of the show standing behind a winged gargoyle doing precisely nothing. I'm not even convinced there was anything back there. I think they gave the creature wings just to hide the fact that Vince doesn't have a keyboard. He strummed a guitar for three songs, and played the first three notes of 'Oh L'amour' on a Stylophone, but other than that, I think he was just texting on his iPhone...

It didn't matter though, because the music was great. The crowd were pretty wild for a group of forty-somethings, but as luck would have it, my old boss and her husband are even more reserved than me and Lisa, so we weren't quite the last ones to get up and dance.

All in all, it was a great concert, and we had a really good time. But as anyone who's been following this stuff for the past eight years will know, I can't mention Vince Clarke on this blog without half my family turning up to reminisce about the times he used to play his guitar in our living room. So Mum, it's over to you...

2011-11-04T18:15:00.002Z

It was around this time last year that Lisa and I forgot to go and see Lloyd Cole cause a commotion at the Komedia. I don't think we've forgotten any concerts since, but to be honest, it's hard to remember. So twelve months on, we're celebrating our total lack of recall by taking a trip down Memory Lane to see Erasure at the Brighton Dome tonight. It should be a memorable evening.

Not only have we managed to remember, remember the fourth of November (and our tickets for this concert), but the name of the support act rings a bell too. After a bit of investigation on the internet today, I discovered that supporting Erasure tonight will be Frankmusik, a 26-year-old singer-songwriter who used to a beatboxer named Mr Mouth. No, seriously. Despite being young enough to be my son (I was a mature 12-year-old), Frank has just produced Erasure's latest album, worked with Tinchy Stryder, and at the age of 23, supported Keane when we saw them at the Brighton Centre in February 2009.

Unfortunately, Lisa was breastfeeding a four-month-old baby at the time, so we arrived at the venue half an hour late, and walked in to the sound of Frankmusik saying "Thank you and good night!". I thought it might have been his opening rap, but it turned out to be his closing wrap-up. With a bit of luck we might actually hear some of his music tonight.

2011-11-03T20:19:00.004Z

Day three of Movember and the moustache is looking good. But not as good as Amelie's attempts to look like Boo from Monsters Inc. It was the middle of last night before I realised who she reminded me of in that photo. The good news is that the hairier I get, the more I look like Sully, so if Lisa's willing to shut one eye and shave her head, there's every chance the three of us could get work as a Monsters Inc tribute act.

But amongst the laughter and frivolity, it's important not to lose sight of the reason I'm choosing to sprout facial hair from every follicle. So as a sobering reminder of the 2,000 men who will be diagnosed with testicular cancer this year, my Dad has kindly sent me an ultrasound scan of a testicle...

That's the Daily Mail's latest health scare. We've all got people living in our scrotums. I expect it's Johnny Ball.

2011-11-02T19:10:00.002Z

I knew this moustache-growing venture was a good idea. Having been sponsored for the third time last night (thanks Mum), I received the following e-mail from the Movember people:

"Hey Phil,

Congratulations! As a result of your recent donation you are now eligible for the following rewards:

* £25 Free Byron Hamburger Offer - Thanks to our friends at Byron you are now entitled to one FREE hamburger per day at any BYRON restaurant between 3-6pm only, from 7th November to 20th November 2011 inclusive. Visit your Mo Space Rewards page to claim the offer."

Fourteen free hamburgers from Byron?? Good lord. It's pure poetry. And all I had to do was don juan moustache for a month.

Unfortunately, I'm not well-versed on Byron, so I looked them up on the internet, and discovered that all eighteen of their restaurants are in London. Which is not ideal for someone living in Brighton. I might go and camp at St Paul's for a fortnight just to make use of the offer.

Anyhoo, the forty-five pounds I've raised so far for male cancer research is obviously vital for the future health of our nation, but I can't help wondering if it might have been better spent on ninety votes for Amelie in the Argus Cute Kids competition. When Lisa took her for the free photo shoot at Churchill Square a few weeks ago, she decided to order a copy of one of the pictures they took, and having waited patiently for her handsome prints to come, she received a package in yesterday's post...

If that's not worth a few votes from the public, I don't know what is.

2011-11-01T19:04:00.004Z

It's the first of November, and where I come from, that can mean only two things: the National Novel Writing Month and the moustache marathon of Movember. For the past few weeks I've been tempted to take part in both. Particularly as I still haven't finished my novel from last year. But whether it's hare-brained writing or right-minded hair-growth, they both have the same obvious drawback. If I write a novel in a month, I won't spend any time with Lisa, and if I grow a moustache, she won't spend any time with me.

Over the past couple of weeks, I've received e-mails at home inviting me to join NaNoWriMo, and e-mails at work informing me that our Chief Executive is backing Movember. Although more as a spectator than a participant, I believe. After a lot of temptation and a great deal of thought, I eventually decided at the weekend not to participate in either. I'm too booked up to write a novel, and lack the bare-faced nerve to grow a 'tache.

But that all changed yesterday. Well, partially changed yesterday. To be honest, I'm still not mad enough to write a novel, but I have reconsidered my position on facial hair. Out of the blue, my boss announced yesterday afternoon that he's doing a Morgan Spurlock for Movember. And that decision changed everything. Because with two of us taking part, there's every chance we could form a Village People tribute act.

So having gone over the handlebars on the Movember website, I decided last night to show my boss the support and solidarity he deserves, by making a fool of myself alongside him, and raising some cash for male cancer research. Apparently, ten thousand men will die from prostate cancer this year, so I'm doing my bit to help the world reach the eight billion mark a bit sooner.

I'm not sure our patients are ready for my patented Hitler look from 2007, so I'm toning it down this time, and going for a softer, silkier, Saddam Hussein. Or failing that, Stalin. Unfortunately, this kind of public self-humiliation requires a big financial incentive, so I'm holding a razor blade to my throat, and if the money doesn't arrive soon, the moustache gets it.

You can sponsor me by clicking here. I'm on the BSUH Doctors team. I haven't been to medical school, so I think I'm technically a mascot.

2011-10-31T19:22:00.000Z

After four years of accepting Facebook friend requests from people I was at school with, can barely remember, and have no wish to chat to, my stupidity has finally paid off. One of them's just posted something quite funny:

Met a transvestite from Greater Manchester yesterday.
He had a Wigan address.

Well it made me laugh anyway.

Changing the subject, I was looking at this page on the BBC website today, and having entered my date of birth, it told me with quite astonishing accuracy and precision that "When you were born, you were the 3,925,680,835th person alive on Earth and the 78,203,648,881st person to have lived since history began". Unless you think Adam & Eve were an allegory, in which case I'm the 78,203,648,879th. Apparently in 14 years time, the population of the world will have doubled in my lifetime, which is quite a sobering thought. It means I must be getting old.

But with the world's population set to reach the seven billion mark, and tonight being Halloween, the good news is that I've found a way to increase that figure still further, whilst simultaneously scaring small children.

Unfortunately it's date night tonight, so I'll have to tell you tomorrow. But before you ask, it doesn't involve impregnating Lisa whilst dressed as the child-catcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

Frankly, once was enough.

2011-10-30T14:22:00.000Z

The thing about putting the clocks back is that it makes a bad night seem so much longer. It was barely still summertime when Lisa and I made it to bed last night, but within an hour, Amelie had woken up in tears, claiming that a Mummy spider and a girl spider had come into her bedroom and frightened her. There was an encouraging moment when she mentioned that they both had eight legs, thereby proving that our educational efforts haven't been in vain, but other than that it was a pretty bad experience. She promptly refused to stay in her bedroom in case the arachnid single mother came back, and within five minutes she was installed on my side of the bed, while I slept in the living room.

To be honest though, I think I had the better deal. I might have been woken up by Chloe howling in my ear at 6am, but Lisa's been awake since four, listening to Amelie chatting incessantly and kneeing her in the back. She could have done with a good night's sleep too, because as of last night, Lisa's going down with a cold.

So in terms of mood, we're currently putting the mean back into Greenwich Mean Time, but prior to that, we'd actually had a very nice evening. We kindly invited Lisa's mother over to spend an evening of fun and relaxation on our sofa... while we went out for a few hours without Amelie. We'd been invited over to Worthing by the lovebirds in this photo. I described them last November as looking like Taylor Swift and Minty from EastEnders, a comment which went down a lot better with her than with him.

But a year on, all has been forgiven, and we were duly invited over for a game of Scrabble at their new love nest in the upper reaches of High Salvington. Despite preparing for the event by downloading Scrabble for the iPad a month ago, I've failed to wrestle it away from Amelie long enough to actually have a game, meaning that it's about ten years since I last played. Unlike Lisa, who's never played. To be honest, I don't know why we accepted this challenge.

But fortunately, Scrabble's like riding a bike. Lisa can't do it, and I've never forgotten it. I successfully positioned myself to Lisa's left at the table, meaning that every time she innocently built towards the edge of the board, I was right there to get on the triple word score. It was a tactic which worked wonders, and despite some stiff opposition (and mild cheating) from our opponents, I managed to scrape home in front. They've assured me I won't be invited over again.

With the Scrabble challenge completed, we settled down for meal of pizza and pasta, which was slightly delayed when the chef had a Gordon Ramsey moment, looked at her home-made pasta dish, and said "I'm not serving that", meaning we had to wait while she whipped up another one. By the time the dessert came out, it was almost 11pm and our hosts were considering putting the clocks back just to make it less embarrassing.

But despite that, we had a lovely evening with two lovely people, and returned home shortly before midnight to relieve Lisa's mother from baby-sitting duties. Her evening had apparently gone smoothly, with just one notable exception: she couldn't find Amelie's toothbrush. Needless to say, most children would be only too pleased to go to bed without having to clean their teeth, but not Amelie. She went to bed telling her Nanny that her teeth will go rotten and fall out. Like I say, our educational efforts haven't been in vain.

2011-10-29T17:05:00.005+01:00

Anyone who thinks that Amelie spends all her time on the iPad would be wrong. She also uses the laptop a lot...

It's better because it balances on your knees, leaving you one hand free to suck your thumb.

Obviously she uses it mainly for Facebook, Twitter and Skyping her friends in other countries, but today she's been engrossed in a game called 'Dora Saves the Crystal Kingdom'. For about six hours straight. Frankly I could have saved the place quicker myself. As it happens, we met Dora back in September when we visited Nickelodeon Land, but Amelie got confused and thought it was just "a person dressed up as something", so she's none the wiser. The game could be about Dora Bryan for all she knows.

Anyway, the good thing about this game is that in addition to teaching Amelie important life-lessons about singing butterflies and talking monkeys, it also uses Dora the Explorer's status as the world's most famous Latina (after Gloria Estefan) to inject a bit of Spanish into her life. At various points in the game, Dora repeats key phrases in her native tongue, allowing Amelie to pick up the lingo and learn a second language.

She's played it so much today that she really should be fluent by now, but unfortunately I don't think I'll be booking a holiday in Barcelona just yet. A major part of the game involves clicking on bunnies as they pop out of rabbit holes, whilst avoiding clicking on the squirrels and armadillos. Amelie's already questioned the realism of it all, by asking why on earth the other animals are in the rabbit's burrow, but in addition to that, she's wrestling with a far more confusing concept.

When you've captured your full quota of rabbits, Dora shouts "Cinco conejitos!", which is Spanish for 'five bunnies'. Unfortunately, Amelie, who assumes she's speaking English, hears it as "Click on the hippos!". She's spent the afternoon frantically moving the mouse, searching in vain, and asking me where all the hippos have gone.

But the good news is that Amelie's newfound linguistic skills could come in very handy in the future. Twenty years ago, Lisa worked in an office with a chap called Chris, who has recently left Brighton behind him to become an estate agent in Arizona. He's started a blog to publicise his business, and yesterday he published this photo...

That's a house in Phoenix with 2,400 square feet of space, 4 bedrooms, 2.5 bathrooms (I presume the half is a sink), a garage and a private swimming pool. And it's on the market for about £60,000. The moment Amelie learns Spanish, we'll be hiring a Mexican pool guy and moving.

2011-10-28T19:12:00.000+01:00

I'm usually poles apart from the Telegraph, but today they're reporting the life-affirming news that the happiest people in Britain were born in 1973. Presumably because it's when we joined the Common Market. According to this article, a recent "poll of 2,000 British adults, aged 18 and above, found that on average, 38 was the age at which people felt most content with their lives". It means that over the course of the rest of my life, I'll never be as happy as I am now. Which is quite a depressing thought.

Of course, the playwright Eugene O'Neill said "One should either be sad or joyful. Contentment is a warm sty for eaters and sleepers". So with only nine months to go until I turn 39, I'm going to spend the evening lying on the sofa with some food.

2011-10-27T18:29:00.000+01:00

When you're in the running for a major award, it's important to perfect that look of genuine (fake) surprise, so as not to appear arrogant in front of your fellow nominees when the winner is announced. So with an avalanche of votes already flooding in (I know of at least three people who've voted), and the possibility of the kind of landslide rarely seen outside Thailand, I've begun preparing Amelie for the moment she's announced as the Cutest Kid in Sussex...

I think that's pretty believable.

2011-10-26T19:14:00.002+01:00

The front page of today's Argus screams 'HORROR OF HUMAN FIREBALL', and reports on a man who suffered major burns after being electrocuted in Brighton. But the biggest story in today's issue is the bright spark lighting up page 27...

Yes, like her intrepid cat before her, Amelie's being featured in The Argus. At least I think that's her. To be honest, there are a total of 276 children pictured in today's issue, and it took me about ten minutes to spot her. I'd know that face anywhere. But clearly not in a newspaper.

Amelie's featured in the 3-5 years category of the Cute Kids portrait competition, alongside beautifully named cherubs such as Destinee, River, Chanel and Orlando. Phil and Lisa don't feature. But there's a Charlie and Lola on the same page, which is nice. She's losing points by refusing to do the 'back of the hands under the chin' modelling pose, and her smile looks a little strained, but let's face it, she usually poses like this...

... so we can't really complain.

You now have until Friday, November 11th to vote for Amelie to win the competition (other children are available), and you can do so by phoning this unique number:

09011 592707

Alternatively, you can text the word CUTEKIDS followed by a space and then the code 2707 to the phone number 80360.

Unfortunately each vote costs at least 50p, and the prize is only worth £300, so Mum, if you're reading this, don't vote more than six hundred times.

2011-10-25T18:44:00.001+01:00

It's more than a fortnight now since I started my latest diet (I'd call it a health kick, but to be honest it's more of a toe-poke), so I feel I should report on my progress before I lose the use of my fingers due to extreme muscle wastage.

I've actually lost thirty pounds. Which was the price of three months subscription to the Weight Watchers website. It was worth it though, because after two weeks of slow fasting and phat slimming, I've lost a total of 5lb. Which is fantastic news, because according to Weight Watchers' advanced online calculations, I only need to lose another four-and-a-half stone to be healthy. I think I must have entered my height wrong.

To be honest, I've found it fairly easy. The all-new Pro-Points version of Weight Watchers allows you to eat as much fruit as you like, so I've been going bananas in spectacular fashion. The worldwide banana price seems to have crashed in recent weeks, and all the supermarkets are selling them at 55p a kilo. It means I can eat a pound of bananas a day (and don't think I'm not) for about 25p. If this carries on until Christmas, I'll have saved enough money to get liposuction, and the whole diet will be pointless.

But in the meantime, I think there's every chance I'll be in a bikini next summer. Although I'll be wearing it under my work clothes, so no one will know.

2011-10-24T20:19:00.003+01:00

You know that sinking feeling you get when you realise you've been double-booked...

This one's particularly bad, because on top of being down to do a clinic in Brighton on Wednesday afternoon, I know nothing about Eastbourne in the 1960's. Although I've visited the Wish Tower Restaurant, which amounts to the same thing. You know what they say though, if you can remember Eastbourne in the sixties, you weren't there. Either that or you've got Alzheimer's, which is not uncommon in the town.

To be honest, I don't even remember agreeing to give an illustrated talk, but I find it hard to believe there are two Phil Gardners willing to work for £3 a ticket. Frankly I'll turn up to anything if you pay my bus fare and buy me an interval ice cream. I like to think it's my USP. So I refuse to accept there's another one.

The last time my words were spoken in public, they were charging five pounds a head...

I made ten quid that evening. So £3 seems pretty reasonable. It's all about market forces. And setting out your stall. No, hang on, I'm getting Phil Gardner mixed up with Ian Beale.

Anyway, if you fancy turning up on Wednesday to ask Phil about his memories of Eastbourne (mine are here, but they're unlikely to feature), the talk's at East Dean Village Hall. It's a stone's throw from Beachy Head, so if the audience lose the will to live, they'll have somewhere to go on to afterwards.

2011-10-23T18:38:00.001+01:00

I was in the bath this morning, reading 'The Week' magazine from a fortnight ago (it's what you call being behind The Times), and I came across this apology for an article on page 11...

You'd think the cow in the background would have given it away.

It's an easy mistake to make though. Personally I've never heard of this Noora bint, but I'm always confusing Devon dairy farmers with Bahrain princesses. It's why I've never married into royalty, but I eat a lot of cheese. Admittedly there's a Persian Gulf of difference between a milk maid and a princess, but if I were Sheikha Noora bint Isa Al Khalifa, I'd change the 'b' in my name to a 'p' and tell everyone I come from Moo-rain. Bahrain sounds like it's full of royal shepherds.

On the subject of awkward cows, I've spent today building bridges with Amelie (mostly out of Megablocks), and attempting to repair the father-daughter bond that was stretched to breaking point at the gates of Queens Park yesterday. Her first words to me this morning were "Have you still got a headache, Daddy?", to which I was tempted to reply "Yes, and bizarrely we're trying for another one", but I wasn't sure she'd understand the subtext, so I told her I was fine, and offered to play a game with her instead.

As it transpires, we've had a relaxing, enjoyable Sunday, spent playing, chatting, reading, cooking, cleaning, eating fish finger sandwiches, and proving that sometimes, just sometimes, a cover version can be better than the original song...

She owned that stage, made the song her own, and above all, proved that what the original lacked was a driving beat played on a plastic beehive. It's a yes from me.

2011-10-22T20:17:00.003+01:00

If you're looking for explicit photos from the Brighton swinging scene, you've come to the right place...

We did a bit of dogging shortly afterwards with a Yorkshire Terrier and a poodle. Frankly they were like animals.

Anyhoo, that was Amelie and me at Queens Park this afternoon, where we had a threesome with Lisa for a couple of hours. I pushed that girl to her limit, which, it transpired, was about forty-five minutes on a swing. My arms are aching like you wouldn't believe. But not as much as my head. Or my heart. Suffice it to say that two hours spent pushing, swinging, spinning and sliding, followed by ten minutes eating an ice cream, wasn't enough to satisfy our daughter. She threw a major tantrum when we tried to leave, and Lisa and I were reduced to dragging her through the gates of the park by her wrists like a couple of child abductors, while an entire playground full of parents half our age, turned to see where all the screaming was coming from. Never mind swinging, it was more like sadomasochism.

2011-10-21T18:47:00.002+01:00

With the possible exception of Chloe, Amelie's favourite toy at the moment is a purple plastic pony called Hellodadada. She named it herself. She also has a pink pony with an interesting name, but I haven't worked out how to spell that one yet. When she says the name, it sounds like Chewbacca speaking Swahili. I'm waiting for her to learn how to write, so that she can set me straight on the letters.

As befits the role of the chosen one, Hellodadada was selected to be part of Amelie's entourage when we went to Stefan and Andrew's on Sunday, and was party to the tea making that went on. As mentioned at the time, we were lucky enough to receive some old china from our old chinas, and Amelie's been itching to make a brew ever since. When I got home from work yesterday, the first thing she asked me to do was to put the kettle on. I think she gets that from Lisa.

As an experienced Mr Tea, I pity the fool who can't make their own cuppa, so naturally I agreed to help, and within minutes, Amelie, Hellodadada and I were sitting down to afternoon tea in the drawing room. Although I made her put the crayons away first.

There was some initial confusion about the difference between a kettle and a teapot, and I was disappointed with Amelie's reluctance to sing a song ("don't know how it goes", my foot) but other than that, the event was a complete success. Hellodadada blasted off in a teacup, Amelie used more sugar than tea, and above all, the three of us learnt not to cry over spilt milk...

Her self-belief is admirable, but I'm still trying to get that tea out of the carpet.

2011-10-20T19:39:00.004+01:00

I must admit, yesterday's blog post wasn't the one I intended to publish. I actually wrote a couple of extra paragraphs about my own motivations to quit between 8:30am and 1pm yesterday morning, but having shown it to Lisa, she felt that rather than offering me "support and information", they'd be more likely to sack me without any pension. So I filed it under 'Things to Publish After I Win the Lottery', and left it at that.

But in the meantime, I've discovered the perfect date movie. And I don't mean 'Friday the 13th'. Lisa and I attempted another romantic evening of love this week, so I suggested we snuggle up on the sofa and watch The Killing Room. Wikipedia gives the plot away within three sentences, so I wouldn't click on that link, but suffice it to say it's a charming everyday tale of four people being murdered in a box. I bought the DVD for three quid in Asda, mainly because it stars the bloke who presents 'America's Got Talent', and I thought I'd enjoy seeing him slaughtered.

As it transpired, it was a very good film. Frankly, Nick Cannon needs to fire himself from the talent show and do more of this acting lark. He and Timothy Hutton were outstanding, the concept was engaging, the plot riveting, and the whole experience was worth £3 of anyone's money. Well, anyone but Lisa. She lost interest shortly after the opening credits, and spent the evening playing 'Puppy Sanctuary' on the laptop. To be honest, it's a miracle we're still married.

2011-10-19T20:14:00.001+01:00

Breaking news from the staff intranet at work...

I presume they help you write your resignation letter, and then show you the door.

2011-10-18T19:05:00.000+01:00

One of my patients gave me a box of chocolates yesterday afternoon. Sadly, it wasn't a blonde bombshell who'd fallen in love with me, it was an Asian pensioner who wanted to thank me. At least that's what he said. In reality he was probably trying to make me diabetic so that I could suffer like he does. Naturally, the offer of gifts from a patient presented me with a bit of a moral dilemma. Not 'should I accept them?', but 'should I give them to Lisa and pretend I bought them for her?'.

Fortunately I have a strong moral compass (which is down to my animal magnetism), and instantly knew the answer: I noticed the chocolates were from Lidl, so I knew she'd never eat them. I'll be sharing them with my colleagues instead.

It was an afternoon of surprises actually. Following on from the Milk Tray man, my next patient was a lady seven years older than Lisa, who was telling me about the problems her son is having looking after his diabetes. I said "Yes, it's a real challenge when you're young". To which she responded "Young? He's thirty-one."

It's not the first time that's happened. I really must remember that Lisa and I are decrepit old freaks of nature who have no right to reproduce at our age and really should be grandparents by now, otherwise I'm going to keep making myself look stupid.

2011-10-17T18:52:00.001+01:00

There's nothing more civilised than Sunday afternoon tea with your best bone china...

You'd never guess she was wearing her cousin's pants and smelling faintly of urine.

We were invited round for Sunday lunch yesterday by our good friends Stefan and Andrew. It was our second lunch date of the day. We'd already been invited over to Portslade to eat out with a couple of cats. So having dressed Amelie in a cute new outfit (age 4-5, obviously) we hit the road for West Hove, on a mission to fix the feline famine with a pouch or two of Whiskas.

It was ten minutes into our journey when we heard the words "Oh no" coming from the back of the car. We responded with an optimistic "What?", which produced the reply "My seat's wet". I won't go into details, but suffice it to say, it wasn't a leak in the sunroof.

Once at Lisa's sister's house, I fed the starving cats, while Lisa removed Amelie's gorgeous tights, took off her pretty underwear, then dressed her in a pair of her 5-year-old (male) cousin's pants, and put her boots back on with no socks. She then rode to Stefan and Andrew's on a pile of kitchen roll. It wasn't quite the stylish arrival we'd anticipated, but hey, we knew our hosts were unlikely to dress for dinner...

Although Andrew had made a bit of an effort. That's not him, obviously. That's just a well-dressed dummy. And standing behind her is a mannequin.

Anyhoo, it's been stated on this blog many times that meeting up with Stefan & Andrew is a bit like visiting a cash & carry. But without the cash. They gave us so many free gifts yesterday that I felt like I was playing 'Double or Drop' on Crackerjack. Andrew's got so many boxes of cut-price goodies stashed away in that flat, it feels like you're having lunch with Del Boy.

The finest of the gifts we received yesterday was the miniature china tea set in the photo above. It's probably 'china' as in 'made in', but it's the perfect size for Amelie, and before we knew it, she was making strawberry redbush tea for us all. She already knows how to open the biscuit tin, so I just need to teach her to boil the kettle, and we'll be living the life of Riley. Or Tetley.

To be honest though, I think she prefers cold beverages. Having asked for "a real drink" (I don't know where she gets these phrases), she was handed a glass of cactus juice (no, really), complete with a couple of ice cubes. It began a three-hour-long love affair with frozen water. By the end of the afternoon she'd eaten so many ice cubes, she was like Hansel & Gretel in an igloo.

So with pre-dinner drinks downed, it was onto lunch. Here's Andrew's sister Nora (who was invited over mainly for her gravy-making skills) showing the ice queen how they use a knife and fork in Canada...

Wrongly, judging by that photo.

But if they struggle with cutlery, Canadians sure know how to make a pumpkin pie. Andrew produced the finest home-made pie I've ever tasted. And I've tasted Lisa's cottage. It was so good, I had to have second helpings, just to confirm I wasn't dreaming. Obviously I'm on a strict diet at the moment, but I'm allowed as much fruit and veg as I like, and I'm sure my third of a pie was about four of my five a day.

Having eaten her dessert with a spoon that Andrew stole from Pizza Express, Amelie retired to the drawing room...

That's Stefan politely pointing out that she was colouring the elephants green. I don't think she was that bothered.

So while Amelie relaxed on the sofa, Lisa and I continued to see what gifts we could extract from our hosts. The answer, in case you're wondering, was a glass cafetiere and a lava lamp. It felt like a 1970s game show. The star prize, however, went to Nora, who received a USB record player for her birthday, and promptly started burning MP3s of Marlene Dietrich at the dinner table.

That left the rest of us free to look at old photos of Andrew riding Marvel the Mustang, while he decorated the laptop with rhinestones, and Stefan demonstrated his new gadget: a Polaroid PoGo Digital Photo Printer. It's a small handheld device which can print three-inch long, full-colour photo stickers wirelessly from a mobile phone, without ink of any kind. It's the closest you can get to magic without actually being a witch. Nora snapped a photo of us on Andrew's mobile, and within seconds, this was spewing out of Stefan's hand...

For a 2"x3" printout of a mobile phone pic, I think that's pretty good. My photo might be slightly clearer...

But you can't peel the back off and stick it on the fridge within thirty seconds of taking it. I think that's why Amelie looks so anguished.

2011-10-16T12:15:00.001+01:00

When a stroke strikes, you have to act FAST...

I saw Amelie's Face turn to a smile, her Arm go up, and the start of a short Speech about how much she loves cats, and I knew it was Time to grab my camera before she got clawed in the face.

Lisa's sister and her family have gone to Wales for the weekend. I'm not entirely sure why, but I think it's some kind of mobile counselling service for depressed rugby fans. So as experienced animal handlers (Amelie can pick up anything smaller than a hippo), we've kindly agreed to feed their cats. The one above is Basil, a sage old cat that Amelie has a lot of thyme for. He's the replacement for Pie, who got a little run down in March.

So like a feline meals-on-wheels service, we drove over to Portslade (or West Hove as Lisa's sister likes to call it) yesterday lunchtime to save a couple of cats from starvation. It's the first time that Amelie's met Basil, but she's an old friend of Tiger. This is what they looked like in June 2010, and here they are yesterday...

They've both grown up so much. Amelie's a lot bigger, and Tiger's a great deal wiser. He kept at least a metre away from her at all times.

Anyhoo, our first attempt at cat-feeding went pretty well. Admittedly, most of the food was eaten by Basil, while Amelie was busy chasing Tiger up the stairs, but the way I look at it, if one of them survives the weekend, we've done a good job. I did ask Lisa if we should empty their litter trays while we were there, but she assured me that we hadn't been asked to do so, and that she's not going within three feet of cat poo without an industrial hazard suit and a face mask. And I didn't know where they kept those. So I hope they've got an air freshener when they get home.

2011-10-15T20:23:00.002+01:00

I spent yesterday afternoon doing a bit of Optical Coherence Tomography at the Sussex Eye Hospital with this bloke and the machine on the left. Those are twenty-five words I never thought I'd write. Mainly because I struggle to string a Coherence sentence together. I've never done OCT before, but having looked at the calendar, this seemed like the right month to try it.

In addition to operating the camera, I also posed as a patient and had an OCT done on my own eyes, which was an interesting experience. Suffice it to say that the person who designed the opening titles of The Matrix clearly suffered from macular oedema and was seeing an ophthalmologist. Frankly, Topcon could sue for breach of copyright.

But the moving green grid the patient has to look at is nothing compared to the visuals on the other side of the machine. This is the screen the operator gets to see after every scan of the retina...

That's what you call eye candy.

2011-10-14T17:27:00.002+01:00

It's amazing the things you find when you're looking for photos of children on the internet.

Let me rephrase that. After publishing yesterday's blog post, Lisa mentioned that every day this week, The Argus have printed a couple of random shots from their Cute Kids contest, in an effort to encourage more people to enter. Naturally, we're too cheap to buy the paper, so I presume she got this information from her mother, who's the last of the big spenders, and reads The Argus religiously. She's even in it on a regular basis.

So I began idly perusing the Argus website, and the site of The Brighton and Hove Studio, which is home to the photographers who took Amelie's picture yesterday, in the hope of finding some under-age models who could put a smile on my face. BH Studio have some nice shots of Katie Price, and one of Kerry Katona (so they clearly have a classy clientele), but their site also features this announcement: "CUTE KIDS Pictures will be uploaded and on a gallery after all the pictures have appeared in THE ARGUS newspaper (Oct 24-28th)". So there's currently no cuteness available.

But if you think the search was a waste of a time, you'd be wrong. In the course of my investigations, I clicked on a link, and ended up at this website, where you can purchase photos that have appeared in The Argus. There's a red button in the top left where you can search the images 'By Keywords and Date Range', so on a whim, I entered the word 'cat', and the dates of the second week of February 2009, and to my complete surprise, it came up with this:

That's twenty photos of me drowning a cat in the shower, and then strangling it in the living room. Despite worldwide media attention at the time (and I'm reliably informed that Chloe's still pretty big in Lithuania), I'm fairly certain that no more than eight of those were ever published. Twelve of them I've never seen. Let's face it, if they'd ever shown them to me, I'd have insisted they publish this one...

I don't know if I've been airbrushed by The Argus or touched up by The Times, but either way, my skin has never looked so good. Frankly I could pass for a twelve-year-old. Albeit with stubble and premature baldness. You'd never believe I had a four-month-old baby in the next room.

I've checked out the purchasing options for that picture, and apparently I can have it printed onto a t-shirt for £16. So that's Lisa's Christmas present sorted.

2011-10-13T18:55:00.001+01:00

Here's a rhetorical question for you:

Although if you need an answer, it's "Duh".

I discovered yesterday that The Argus are running a cute kids contest at the moment. Obviously if Amelie enters, it'll be a no contest, but that aside, if you take your child along to the Churchill Square shopping centre any day this week, you can have their portrait done for free by a professional photographer. The resulting pics will then be published in The Argus, and the great people of Brighton will use their skill and judgement to select the cutest. At which point the person with the most friends wins.

Obviously, Amelie's been caught on camera many times at Churchill Square, but usually it's by security guards armed with CCTV. She's no stranger to being snapped though. Only the night before last, she woke up at 3am, saying a crocodile was after her. To be honest, at the moment she's not so much living the dream, as having a nightmare. She burst into tears at 10 o'clock last night, and when we went in and asked her what was wrong, she told us a talking giraffe had upset her. It's like she's being haunted by the ghost of Johnny Morris.

So while I was slaving over a hot retina at work today, I instructed Lisa to soothe our disturbed daughter by taking her out for a photo shoot. Like all top models, Amelie won't get out of bed for less than fifty quid, which is handy, as that's the prize in each category. I think the word 'great' is a misprint. It cost Lisa three quid to get there on the bus, but that still leaves us £47 up on the deal. Unless you include the 42p we spent on The Argus.

Obviously I wasn't there to witness today's photographic assignment, but I'm reliably informed that Amelie was the very model of professionalism. She marched in there, complained about being kept waiting, then tried to jump the queue, did her best to get into other children's photos, and nearly threw a tantrum when they refused to photograph her dog, Chef. I should explain that Chef is a cuddly German Shepherd I bought from a charity shop. I suggested she call him Shep, but due to a breakdown in communication, and the fact that I was speaking with my mouth full, she mis-heard me, and he's been Chef ever since. It's like we're living in South Park.

Anyway, they took six photos of our little diva this afternoon, two of which Lisa liked, and one of which will be appearing in The Argus on Wednesday, 26th October. So you've got two weeks until I start shamelessly begging for votes.

2011-10-12T18:07:00.000+01:00

It's almost a week now since I last mentioned any medical problems (unless you count my morbid obesity), so in case anyone's concerned about my current state of health, I'd just like to reassure everyone reading this that I'm still ill. Frankly I've been at death's door for so long, the Grim Reaper thinks I'm squatting in his porch.

I returned to work last Thursday, so with perfect timing, my throat got a lot worse on Friday, and by Sunday I was coughing. Fortunately the soreness is now a lot better. So today I've developed a blocked up nose. I feel like I'm playing the I-Spy game of common ailments. I coughed my way to Crawley yesterday, and today I've been sniffing around Haywards Heath. By tomorrow I'll be vomiting all over Brighton.

I obviously look pretty rough too. One of my patients today was telling me about his experiences at a minor public school in Leamington Spa (I didn't tell him I went to a Comprehensive in Basildon), and having mentioned his old GCE exams, he said "It's all GCSEs now of course, but I'm sure you remember doing GCEs". I've never been so offended in my life. I was going to say "No, but my wife does", before realising that Lisa's finest achievement was a CSE in Child Studies. I wasn't sure he'd be that impressed.

But while I crawl slowly into my sick bed and die, here's an interesting article to read. Judging by the 1,000 angry and insulting comments it's received within a few hours, not everyone agrees with the author's conclusions, but it's always good to challenge your own perception of the truth. And as everyone knows, alcohol changes your perceptions. I expect she'd had a drink when she wrote it.

2011-10-11T21:35:00.001+01:00

I think last night went pretty well. Let's face it, the last time Lisa went on a date, she had to get her Mum to tell the bloke she'd gone abroad the following day. At least this time she's still in the country. Obviously I don't want to get carried away, but she says she'd like to see me again, so I think I'll play it cool and phone her in a couple of days. Unless I get a better offer in the meantime.

As for my diet, I've successfully completed two days of deprivation, although I've also had fair warning of the temptations I'll face. One of the receptionists at Crawley Hospital (she refers to herself as 'Front of House', so I keep expecting her to show me to my seat with a torch) has just become a grandmother for the first time. As a result, I spent most of today flicking through baby photos and hearing what labour feels like on two paracetamol. For the mother, that is. The grandmother was on something much stronger. I received an apology from her for the fact that I'd missed the celebratory cake last week, followed by a promise that she'll bring one in especially for me next week. I didn't like to tell her I'm on a diet. Mainly because I probably won't be by then.

After a day hearing about other people's bundles of joy, I returned home to my own this evening. Unfortunately she was busy ironing, so I quickly moved on to Amelie, who was swanning about the place in her superstar dressing gown with a cat under her arm. Having told me how much she'd missed me today, she then launched into her latest comedy routine by asking me why the chicken crossed the road. I said I didn't know, so she told me it was because he wanted to get away. To be honest, I laughed mainly out of politeness.

But never one to miss an opportunity for a bit of comedy improv, I turned on my camera and the two of us started riffing like old showbiz pros. It was essentially 'Whose Line Is It Anyway' for people with no sense of humour. I might not have unearthed a great deal of talent, but I did uncover a dastardly plot...

I think Lisa's Mum is after my iPad.