Tom Cruise, eat your heart out...

Admittedly, in Tom Cruise's case he was hanging upside down in an attempt to infiltrate a CIA computer and save the world, whereas I was just trying to get my hands on some food, but overall, I think my mission yesterday afternoon was far more impossible.

Don't let the chirpy smiles fool you...

We spent Monday pitting our wits against Moriarty. And frankly we lost.

The location for this meeting of minds was the Hidden Valley Discovery Park near Launceston, which is basically a park-based version of a puzzle app.

You start out here, at Moriarty's Mansion, an apparently small and misleadingly-named house...

I should point out that Toby's not throwing up there. He was actually loving it. No, really.

Anyhoo, you're given an electronic key card, and in the tradition of all good 'room escape' games, you're informed that all you need to do is get out. The house itself is a labyrinth of odd rooms, locked doors and weird corridors...

... and it's only afterwards (quite a long time afterwards, in our case) that you realise the house you see on the outside is only a small part of it. It actually extends across the first floor of the visitor centre via a connecting tunnel, but you're so disorientated when you're in there, you lose all sense of direction and have no idea of the scale. It's ingeniously constructed, with some brilliant effects...

There's no time for hanging around though...

... (well, maybe just a little bit of time)...

... because along the way, you have to attempt six of Moriarty's Missions - electronic puzzles which are activated using your key card, and range from the fairly easy to the fiendishly difficult. They all have a time limit, which is based partly on the electronic clock which counts down as you attempt the challenge, and partly on the time it takes Toby to realise that the rest of his family are engrossed in a brainteaser, and perform a room escape of his own.

When you eventually make it out, you can insert your key card into a slot in the visitor centre and it tells you which challenges you completed...

I defy anyone to complete that Fuel Rod mission. I was standing on a chair at one point, and then lying on the floor. It was like The Crystal Maze. But with more hair. And ultimately I think my team let me down.

Anyhoo, our next challenge had us running into the undergrowth...

... dashing across ditches...

... and looking puzzled on paths...

The Indiana Trail involved finding wooden posts, following ropes through the bushes, discovering tags, identifying animals, collecting letters and adding up numbers. It was particularly enjoyed by Lisa, as she got to sit on a picnic bench for half an hour while I scrambled through the vegetation with the kids.

By the end of it, I fully deserved the home-made steak burger they served me in the cafe, and was right up for visiting a hobbit...

That's him in the window. And fortunately, he invited us in...

Lisa and Toby headed off to the adventure playground at that point, leaving me and Amelie to conquer the hedge maze...

... and then attempt the Sherlock Holmes Trail. I have to say, this was my favourite part. From the starting point at one end of the park, you have to follow clues, each one giving a pointer to the location of the next, which could be anywhere in the park. For the intelligent lateral thinker, it's a simple matter of going from point to point. For us, it was a criss-crossing circuitous route covering what felt like twenty miles. And that was just to find Clue 2.

For me, the highlight of the entire day was clue number five, which we found on the underside of a shelf in an outbuilding, and which read: "4 red dots, followed by 6 yellow dots, followed by 14 green dots. Behind the 12th green dot is hidden your next clue".

I kid you not: we spent an hour wandering around the park looking for dots. Well, *I* did. Amelie gave up after twenty minutes and Lisa forced me to go and get her a coffee. But I refused to be beaten. Apart from brow-beaten, obviously. Having scoured the entire Hidden Valley without success, I suddenly noticed a tiny pattern of coloured dots on the back of the park map I'd been carrying with me the whole time. I poked my pen through the 12th green dot, made a hole through to the aerial map of the park on the other side, and it marked a location at one end of a small wooden bridge. Arriving there, I searched the entire structure without success, before getting down on my hands and knees, and finding the next clue on the underside of one of the wooden fence slats, exactly where the map had indicated.

I may be slightly nerdy (although still very much a man's man, obviously), but I loved that.

But not as much as Lisa, who had said to me 45 minutes earlier "Are there any dots on your map..?". I'd ignored her, obviously. Besides which, she was wrong. They were on the back of my map.

Unfortunately, it had taken so long to find clue 6 that we ran out of time to find the seventh before the park closed, which was gutting, as we were less than half way through and I was having the time of my life. We did, however, bask in the glory of completing the first five clues, adding up the answers and getting the right total...

After which Amelie did her victory pose on the railway bridge...

All in all, it was a fab day out, made even better by the almost complete absence of human beings...

Although the three in that photo come close. I'm not saying we were right to take Amelie out of school for four days, but frankly if it means saving hundreds of pounds and getting the tourist attractions to ourselves, her education can go hang.

Bear Grylls, eat your heart out...

Admittedly, my own wilderness survival experience featured two cream teas and a cheese sandwich, but that doesn't diminish the fact that I was lucky to get out alive. Don't let the words 'National Trust' fool you. This was extreme, near-death adventuring.

Anyhoo, it's a well known fact that you can please one of the children all of the time and both of the children some of the time, but you can never please both of the children all of the time...

So for the first day of our holiday, I didn't even bother trying. I told them we were going to Lydford Gorge, packed them into the car and turned on the child locks.

On arrival, we were greeted by a very friendly member of staff who spent ten minutes trying to flog us National Trust membership, and precisely no minutes whatsoever warning us of the impending doom that was waiting for us at the bottom of the canyon. Admittedly, he's probably never received any complaints, but that's only because no one ever makes it out alive.

It all started well enough, with Toby leading the inevitable sing-song as we strolled our way through the woods at the top of the gorge...



We even paused for the odd (and I use that word deliberately) family photo...

I did express some mild concern about the sheer drop on the right hand side of the path, and the fact that one member of our party was liable to trot along in a world of their own without due care and attention, but having discussed it with Toby, he said he'd keep an eye on Lisa for me.

After a mile and a half (and a stop at the National Trust cafe), we made it to the main attraction: the 30-metre-high White Lady Falls...

Falls is an appropriate word, as there are plenty of chances to take a tumble, and Lisa had to be helped down the rocks at the bottom whilst being overtaken by a couple of pensioners, but it was worth the trek for a spectacular view of the waterfall and the chance to have our photo taken by a random member of the public...

Toby was keeping count of the number of times Lisa had muttered 'Never again...'

... while I attempted to take her mind off the perils by suggesting that she take her coat off and recreate the Timotei advert.

Sadly, she was having none of it, so we set off on the return journey, which took us a mile and a half along the bottom of the gorge. I expected it to be a lot safer; after all, we were no longer walking along the top of a 35m ravine, so it was essentially a stroll along a riverbank.

Unfortunately, this particular stroll had clearly been designed by someone unfamiliar with the words 'Health & Safety'. The further we went, the less the path went with us...

... and at times, you didn't so much need walking boots as rock climbing gear...

I haven't actually photographed the most treacherous parts, as I was too busy gripping Toby's hand like his life depended on it (which, frankly, it did). There was never anything between us and the river, and the 'path' was frequently nothing more than a two-foot-wide jagged rock. As I said to Lisa at the time, the only thing which could have improved this as a tourist attraction would have been the addition of a few iguanas.

The irony is that both the children loved it. I spent most of the time wondering which of them I should try to save first if they both fell off the next narrow, slippery ledge into the fast moving water below, while Lisa was staving off a panic attack behind me, and on the verge of crawling on all fours in an attempt to avoid certain death. But the kids couldn't have been happier...

And, to be fair, if you can cope with the cold sweat of fear at every death-trap-laden step, the views are well worth it. I enjoyed it in the same way I enjoy a rollercoaster ride: in hindsight. And preferably no more than once.

I have to say though, the National Trust are surely only one step away from a fatality here. By the time you reach The Devil's Cauldron, you're actually expected to walk across this slippery ledge to the viewing platform with nothing between you and the raging, rocky torrent below...

There's a sign recommending that babies are strapped into front-carriers only. Presumably to give them one last, reassuring look at their mother's face before they both plunge to their deaths. I'd have phoned customer services to request a handrail, but there's no mobile reception in the gorge. And they'd never hear you over the roar of the water.

Needless to say, we didn't risk it.

The thing about blogging is that 3,250 posts is never enough. Inevitably, some life-changing and potentially defining moment comes out of left field and drives you to put aside the pressures of work, shove the kids in front of the TV and write that 3,251st entry. An event so pivotal and unexpected that it cries out to be documented.

Yes, it’s true. I’ve beaten Amelie at table football.

Oh, and Lisa has cancer.

You should have seen my third goal though. It was a screamer. Straight through the defence like a Beckham free kick and into the back of the net. It’s no wonder she went off in a huff.

As for Lisa, it transpires that the small and insignificant spot I’ve been looking at on the end of her nose for the past year or so is actually a basal cell carcinoma. And not acne, as I helpfully suggested. With hindsight, it was probably wrong of me to suggest that the reason it kept bleeding every couple of weeks was because she was picking it in her sleep, although I stand by my assertion that the root cause of this condition is her habit of twitching her nose when she’s trying to make a decision.

It’s ironic, as I’ve always assumed Lisa would be diagnosed with a vitamin D deficiency rather than skin cancer. She avoids sunbathing like a vegan avoids steak, and is often tempted to convert to Islam just to give her an excuse to cover up more. So she’s definitely putting the idio into idiopathic here. I can only assume she stuck her nose out of the window once during the long hot summer of 1983 and is paying the price now.

Let’s face it though, this is a woman for whom disaster has dogged every step. And most of those steps have taken her headfirst through glass-fronted sideboards, down steep hills and over cliffs. She can make walking on a level piece of tarmac look difficult. She even managed to follow up her cancer biopsy last week with a trip down a kerb...

I wouldn't mind, but the school run is actually a slow walk.

Anyhoo, it's important to respond sensitively to these things and not make the patient feel that it's somehow their fault, which I think I achieved there. The good news is that having received the cancer diagnosis six days ago, I was able to take the day off work on Friday to attend Lisa's follow-up appointment with a consultant plastic surgeon. It was just as well, as having been told to take a seat in the waiting room, Lisa strode straight down the corridor in the wrong direction, and would probably still be wandering aimlessly around the hospital had I not been there.

As it transpires, however, following her nose in the future will only lead Lisa to the surgeon’s pedal bin. It seems the carcinoma may have infiltrated deeper than first thought and was never likely to respond to the course of Savlon I suggested. Lisa’s been referred to the specialist unit at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead, where she’ll undergo Mohs surgery to remove the end of her nose, followed by a forehead flap reconstruction, which sounds mildly concerning until you look at its Wikipedia page. At which point concern turns to horror.

On the plus side, the outlook is extremely good and she should make a full recovery within months. I’ll also be able to perform a new version of the ‘My Dog’s Got No Nose’ joke at dinner parties. But those considerable pluses aside, it’s not good news, and Lisa’s understandably a bit miffed.

But as luck would have it, we already had a holiday booked for this week, so as I write this, we’re getting away from our worries and stresses on the banks of the River Tamar in Cornwall, staying in a tranquil and relaxing farm cottage. It’s just a shame I couldn’t lie about Lisa’s age and get it paid for by the Make-a-Wish Foundation.

The kids are doing their best to introduce the locals to the concept of noise, but our first twenty-four hours have been a constant delight. The cottage comes with its own football table, which has provided at least one of us with a moment of joy, and we even had a few visitors at our back door this morning...

So give it a few days and Lisa will have caught mad cow disease.

Work-Life Balance

The waiting is finally over...

After years spent wondering if she'd ever stay in one country long enough to say "I do", Big Sis is now married. And has just left the country again. Possibly to avoid being shown up by 'The Great Big Benefits Wedding: Live' which is scheduled for Tuesday on Channel 5, and is likely to prove that she didn't need to spend more than three hundred quid on a cake.

Obviously the key to a successful wedding is to invite the right people, so Amelie and Toby were first on the guest list, and brightening up proceedings with the kind of calm, dignified reverence that befits a life-changing religious ceremony...

I failed to get any footage of Toby dancing down the aisle, but I feel sure it was what Big Sis had in mind when she said she didn't want children at her wedding.

Unfortunately for Big Sis, the Gardners come as a package, and much as Lisa and I would have loved to spend the day like this...

... our foolish life choices meant that we were never far away from a couple of troublesome wedding crashers...

On the plus side, we had the pleasure of spending the previous night in a high class hotel with its own sauna and steam room. Unfortunately they were located in room 216 of the Devizes Travelodge, with no off switch, and a window that not even a stick insect could get through. Alarm bells should have rung when the receptionist pointed us towards the lift with the words "There's a fan on the shelf just inside the door". I can only assume that room 216 is situated directly above room 666 where they burn the sinful souls of Premier Inn guests in the fiery furnace of hell. Either that or the boiler room.

Anyhoo, Lisa had the pleasure of drying her hair three times on Thursday morning as the sweat poured straight out of her brain, and we were eventually forced to evacuate into the car park in our slippers to avoid passing out from the intense heat. But other than that, our preparations went well. Apart from Toby scattering bits of muffin all over the carpet and spilling his drink on the bed. The nice part was bumping into other wedding guests who told us that they knew we'd arrived the previous evening as they'd heard our children through the bedroom walls. I wouldn't mind, but they weren't all on the same floor. Some weren't even in the same hotel.

The good news is that in the space of a few hours we shed enough pounds to fit into our wedding clothes, and despite dangerous levels of dehydration, we made it to St James' church on time and took our places in the second row...

Amelie had an important role to play, which will surely stand her in good stead for her future career as a Ring Girl (it's encouraging for feminists everywhere that Wikipedia has a page devoted to that job)...

... and my Dad successfully walked his daughter down the aisle and happily offloaded her with a major sense of relief...

With the 'I Dos' done and the rings exchanged without the help of a ring girl...

... we left the painful memories of the Devizes Travelodge behind us and journeyed into the countryside to the far more exclusive (and slightly cooler) surroundings of the Manor House Hotel in Castle Combe. One night's stay costs about a week's salary, but fortunately I wasn't paying, so I was more than happy to take advantage of the facilities by stuffing myself with free food and stealing enough shampoo to last me a lifetime. It was a 50ml bottle.

To be honest, the wedding breakfast portions could have been three times bigger and still counted as snacks, and if you were Jewish, you'd have passed out from malnutrition at the evening buffet, but the breakfast the next morning more than made up for any shortcomings, and allowed me to put on a stone in less than half an hour.

In addition to my stomach, I left with a slightly larger head, following some kind comments about my wedding speech...


Although if you're doing an audio-visual presentation at a wedding, it's a good idea to remember not to walk in front of the projector every time you reach for a glass of water.

The first dance was equally well received...


And in fact, Big Sis didn't put a foot wrong all day. She was the most beautiful bride since Lisa, and didn't stop smiling from the moment she walked into the church to the moment she staggered off the dance floor. Although apparently she was still texting my Mum after midnight, so clearly something went wrong somewhere.

Congratulations, Big Sis. We all love you very much. xxx

It's been all downhill for the past couple of weeks...

Don't worry, I haven't grown a moustache. Or a pair. If I wanted to experience extreme levels of terror, I'd just ask Lisa to leave me alone with the kids for a day. I don't need to hurtle off a cliff in a plastic log. That's not actually me. And it's not Doctor Eggman either. In fact, the evil hipster who has my daughter in his menacing clutches is none other than our good friend Andrew. He clearly deserves a medal for bravery. Not for going on the log flume at Brighton Pier, but for spending a few hours with Amelie.

Anyhoo, that was Bank Holiday Monday in Brighton. Toby wasn't allowed out due to extreme levels of naughtiness and a refusal to wear trousers, but we needed someone to keep a close eye on Amelie...

... and Stefan & Andrew are always up for a bit of hard work, so I met them on the pier for some white-knuckle childcare. It gave me the chance to treat Amelie to a kids' wristband entitling her to unlimited free rides, and then watch as she refused to go on any of them. Not that she was completely unreasonable. She was quite willing to try all the adult rides for £4 a go, whilst asking for toffee apples, fish & chips and ice cream. It was just the free stuff she didn't want.

To be honest, you have to take your fun wherever you can find it. We'd spent Saturday afternoon terrorising fish with a big stick in the garden of a good friend, which was surprisingly enjoyable...

Though possibly not for the fish. It did, however, inspire me to live up to my name by philling the car with gardnering stuff for the balcony...

Obviously that pot plant had been knocked over by the wind within twenty-four hours, but it would have been dead within a week anyway due to Amelie's excessive watering.

Anyhoo, the big news of the week is that Brighton & Hove are now red and green apples, bobbing in a sea of Conservatism...

I usually turn to food in moments of stress, so I've been doing a lot of comfort eating since Thursday. It's a good job we've got so many food banks. Things are so bleak that Toby's packed a bag and is heading for the airport...

He's not leaving the country, he's going to meet David Miliband.

Fortunately, we still have mementos of the good old days when liberalism meant street artists wearing hats instead of Paddy Ashdown eating them...


The details are a bit sketchy...

He charged me five quid for that. Bloody capitalist.

It's been so long since I last blogged, my son's turned 16...

Admittedly his growth is a bit stunted, but that's what happens when you live on Barny Bear cakes and ice lollies. Frankly it's a miracle he's still alive. If it wasn't for the peanut butter frosting on his cupcakes, he wouldn't be getting any protein at all.

Anyhoo, the reasons for my prolonged absence are best summed up by this Top Trump, which was kindly created for me by Amelie on an NHS iPad...

Clearly my approach to management is half-arsed, but I'm 100% committed to work. I basically lost the entire month of March to this little endeavour, which I felt was enough of a rollercoaster ride to warrant more than a 10 on my adventure score. Amelie always was a tough marker.

At one point I was asked to write 36,000 words in 3 weeks to win a contract worth ten million. So at £278 a word, I said I'd write a sentence for three grand. It's no wonder we're out of the running.

The lesson I've learned is that when you're leaving for work before your kids get up, and arriving home after their bedtime, you don't want to spend your weekends writing a blog. Admittedly, you don't always want to spend it with them either, but in a lot of ways you feel you ought to. Toby was seeing more of the Yodel delivery man than his own father. He'd started looking at me suspiciously if I walked in without a parcel. So, much like Bloomberg before me, I went offline for a while, in the hope of reminding my kids who I am.

Fortunately I've had enough of that now. I had a week's annual leave booked for March, which had to be cancelled at short notice due to health reasons (the NHS needed me), so I'm taking this week off instead. There's no Cheltenham Festival this week, so it's not quite the same, but at least the weather's slightly better.

We took advantage of it yesterday by heading down to the pier for the afternoon. As the Top Trump above demonstrates, I'm a big fan of Paul Hollywood, so I was particularly pleased to bump into Richard Burr and Chetna Makan from The Great British Bake Off as we strolled past the doughnut kiosk. Needless to say, they weren't buying any. According to Chetna's Twitter, the whole gang were down there yesterday...

Great day @BrightonPier with #bakeoff buddies @marthacollison @RichardPBurr @LaPetitLion Thank you @Treaclebakes xx pic.twitter.com/hxuY4JFtC9

— Chetna Makan (@chetnamakan) April 19, 2015

... but sadly we didn't see the others. I expect they were busy taking that ice cream out of the freezer.

Anyhoo, the sight of Lisa exercising might be shocking...

But even more jaw-dropping than that is the fact that it's now a quarter of a century since this newspaper article was published...

That was posted on Facebook by an old school friend of mine, possibly in an attempt to make me feel old. And bald. I still remember that free bus to Norwich. I've never known luxury like it.

By coincidence, I made a pilgrimage back to the badlands of Essex last weekend to show Toby and Amelie my old school...

And the house I grew up in...

It hasn't changed a bit. You could still have a Rod Hull incident with that TV aerial, and the walls could do with some render. This hedge is new though...

Well, I say new. They could have grown it from seed in the time since I left.

But despite it being 22 years since I moved out, those bollards have stood the test of time, and immediately proved just as irresistible to Amelie as they did to Big Sis three and a half decades ago...

It was all grazed thighs and bruises back in the 70s. But having seen my old stomping ground, Amelie declared that she loved it so much, she'd like to move there. Which demonstrates what life is like for her now. She sees a Basildon council estate as a step up.