Julie Jay: Making a doctor’s appointment is up there with getting a bikini wax in January

Despite both being on antibiotics, I am still chasing my children around shops, because even when fuelled by penicillin, they have yet to meet an automatic door they haven't wanted to run through

A throat infection was the diagnosis of the day for Number One, leading me to gleefully regale anyone in the pharmacy who would listen how I, too, had suffered from many bouts of tonsillitis before my tonsils had been removed sometime in the early ‘90s. Picture: iStock.

The five-year-old is sick, the two-year-old is sick, and their mother (ie, yours truly) is definitely sick.

To be fair, we were all bound to get some kind of scurvy after a December of eating our weight in Quality Street and Tayto crisps, so this bout of illness shouldn’t have taken me by surprise.