We finally agreed daughter could have a new mobile phone for her birthday next month.

Of course, she couldn't wait and pestered and pestered to go to town "just to look".

In the end we said she could have it early as her dad's phone decided to die.

He's now got my old phone because he can't be trusted not to lose an expensive new one and I've got her old phone which he didn't want because it was decorated with purple nail varnish and stick-on jewels.

Daughter now has a tiny silver phone with a flip-top lid and a cool blue screen which is "WAP-enabled" and has lots of games and she is very happy.

Her dad and I have phones you can make a phone call on, which is all we wanted anyway.

We spent the rest of the half-term holiday working out how to use her phone, although we did put time aside for pancake consumption.

We also decided to clear out the other side of our two-part attic. It hasn't had its hatch door opened since we filled it on the day we moved in, nine years ago.

Reluctantly, I opened the hatch. Daughter took one look, decided she wasn't going in in case of spiders and delegated herself the role of person who sits on the bed with a torch and says: "That looks interesting - get that out."

I was the idiot who had to crawl in and haul out two big rugs and a mattress just so we could find out what else was there.

As well as some more ancient LPs belonging to him, we went through my old art folders, full of the work I had done in college.

There were a few drawings I still thought were passable so we kept those with the intention of framing them and actually putting them on a wall.