Sick bag
Nina woke up on Saturday with an evil hangover. Overcome by nausea, she frantically reached for a suitable receptacle, selecting a Gieves & Hawkes bag (where her husband Matthew buys his posh shirts).

Sadly the Saville Row retail packaging proved an unworthy barf bag; puke leaked from the bottom onto the sheepskin rug. Classy bird, mind.

As Matthew so rightly pointed out, "the Swann clan en masse seem to be having rather a bad time of it recently."

As if to prove his point, Matthew was too pissed to drive his car home from the pub last night, so went to pick it up this morning. Sadly, he was parked in a residents' parking zone and his car got towed away to the pound at 8:30 sharp.

Karma for gloating over Liz's stilettoed mishap, perhaps?

"She always has to go one further…"

The whole joy of misfortune, I believe, is not the suffering; it is the sheer pointlessness of it all. How can such calamity emerge from acts of everyday mediocrity?

Today, I was servicing my bike. I used a wee dod of superglue to stick a nut into a plastic bracket as it kept falling out when I was tightening the screw. It did the trick.

Then, while I was adjusting the bracket - a rather fiddly job - I held the screw in my mouth for a few seconds.... and superglued the screw to my lip.

Andy Tedd, my boss at the Beeb, did a spectacular manoeuver last week; as he was leaving a caff in Marylebone, walked straight into the glass door edge-on as it was swinging shut while he was trying to walk through it, and spilt his eye open.

Nic, meanwhile, had sustained lip injuries from his toddler clawing at his mouth. This, combined with Andy's split eyebrow, fuelled rumours of an office punch-up. The truth was a lot less exciting.

Submitted by Matthew Swann:
Regular readers of past misfortune reports will realise that the Swann clan en masse seem to be having rather a bad time of it recently with regard to hideous leg injuries after being knocked off bikes (not my fault and I was sober), getting drunk and tripping over evil kerbs (absolutely Nina’s own fault) and the like.

Never one to be upstaged, my sister (known to many of you for her graceful demeanour and avid commitment to teetotalism) went out with work colleagues last Friday night foolishly wearing stilettos. Surprise surprise, she got drunk, and the effects of alcohol, and the fact that Liz, being the world’s most uncoordinated person at the best of times, was wearing said heels, meant that she took a tumble in the car park outside the restaurant. In agony, and unable to stand up, her colleagues ran to get Simon (husband) to come and pick her up in the car, after discovering that they couldn’t pick her up. Neither could Simon.

Liz had to crawl from where she was lying to the car, then crawl from the car to the sofa when they got home.

A day lying on the sofa in excruciating pain meant that Simon eventually insisted on taking her to A&E last Sunday where they discovered that she had broken her ankle in two places. They had to operate (Saturday) and put a metal plate in to reset the bone and she has to take three months off work.

She always has to go one further…

Dilly's been at it again. On his visit to New York, Matthew invested in some superior kitchen equipment, including a rather posh red rubber spatula. It reminds me of the espisode of Ab Fab where Edina and Patsy who go all the way to NY to buy a designer door knob. Anyway, Matthew left the spatula in the kitchen covered in egg mixture. This proved too tempting for dilly, who quietly took the spatula to her bed and chewed it up.

Oh well, better go back across the pond for a replacement!

Dilly the dog is on holiday from Nina's family and is staying with us for a couple of weeks. Matthew went downstairs on Saturday morning to find that Dilly had pooed all over the kitchen floor.

Usually I get the blame for a mess in the kitchen, but for once there's a greater offender!