Sunday 21st November

I surprise myself by waking up at a reasonable hour and feeling completely fine this morning. K, on the other hand, is rough as a cat's tongue - and so I spend much of the morning hiding in the living room catching up on cosy quiz shows like QI and Have I Got News For You while she naps it off.

By about lunchtime K seems to be back in the land of the living and so we head out of the house. This, despite being still mid-November, is my last chance to get any Christmas shopping done for my family, so the plan is to head into town to trawl Covent Garden for decent presents. On the way, though, we stop off at Euston to visit the new exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. The Wellcome is one of my favourite museums, mostly for the way that it mixes art with science so splendidly - but also because it's adjacent to Euston station and doesn't involve trekking to South Kensington or the like. The exhibition - based on the history of drugs and their effects on the human body - is very new and as such the gallery is as busy as I've ever seen it, but it's still enjoyable to wander around before we get down to the business of shopping.

We walk down through Russell Square towards the West End, stopping at any shops and department stores that take our fancy. We eat a quick lunch at M&S on Tottenham Court Road to fuel the next couple of hours of shopping, which we complete with surprising ease. Certain members of my family are easier to shop for than others, but when we're heading back on the tube later I feel a sense of a job well done.