I AM going to have to apologise in advance for this week's column.

I have a neck injury and I'm in pain and probably should go to A&E in a minute.

Let's just say I was doing something which I now know a 50-year-old woman should not be doing upside down, and I won't be doing it again.

It's OK if I am lying down and taking lots of drugs, but I have been at work all day in front of a computer screen and now can't really think of anything to write except 'Ouch'.

I should of course have been more careful because I seem to be the victim of an annual pre-Christmas grinch.

It's only by looking back over these columns that I realise that every year something always goes tits up a week or so before Christmas.

Just as I'm beginning to think that I'm getting everything sorted and can, finally, look forward to a relaxing Christmas, something goes wrong.

Over the last week my youngest has been off school with tonsillitis and I'd hoped that maybe we'd got all illness out of the way before the festive season.

But then I had to go sliding head first down a water slide like a teenager and collided at the bottom with two enormous blokes. My neck made a horrible crunching noise and I was frankly relieved to find my arms and legs still worked.

I probably should have gone to get somebody to look at it this morning, but that Christmas grinch keeps making other stuff go wrong too.

The car wouldn't start and I had to phone a kind friend to come and drive my son and me to school and work (which meant she was late for work too).

Basically, it's a rotten end to the decade, so as I'm in pain and in a grouch anyway, I thought I'd bring you:

Parking wardens : Say no more. I have had only one ticket this year, which is a massive achievement because I am sure Torbay Council has assigned me my own personal parking warden. Every time I look around I catch one sneaking along behind me out of the corner of my eye.

Parking meters: Ditto.

Restaurant chains: Eating out is so boringly formulaic. I was recently with my family in a branch of one of those cafes which are decorated to make you feel as if you're in somewhere old and Parisian.

My eight year old sat opposite me and was studying all of the old French advertisements pasted around the walls.

He said: "They've spelt 'tiger' wrong." I looked around (this was pre my immobilising neck injury) and saw a poster for 'Anis de Tigre' (some sort of aniseed-flavoured drink, I assumed) and told him it wasn't wrong, that was the French spelling.

Then he announced loudly, so that most of the other diners could hear: "And they've spelt 'anus' wrong as well!"

Sorry if we put anyone off their Pernod, but come to think of it, anus of tiger describes the taste quite well.

The end of Woollies and the end of the High Street as we knew it.

I can't really say I loved Woollies in its final few years, but I loved it when I was a child with its dark wooden floors and high counters with glass edges to stop children's sticky fingers touching the goods.

Is this my imagination, or was there a wooden escalator right in the centre of the Torquay branch when I was a child in the 60s?

I know WHSmith now does pick 'n' mix, but it's not really the same thing, is it?

Facebook: It started out sounding exciting but I don't really get it. People keep asking to be my friend and I feel bad because I don't really want to be on Facebook any more, but I don't know how to get off it. All I get are messages from my daughter who has become an obsessional Farmville addict.

But she's not as crazy as a friend's 18-year-old son who made her stop her car on the motorway and pay £5 so he could log on to their network and tend his crops!

Living Coasts: I know that after divorce, you wouldn't think a bird centre would be a small thing. My son likes it but for me that big black net full of trapped birds on the site of the once-magnificent Marine Spa symbolises what's wrong.

Now Torbay is no longer a tourist trap, let's stop pandering to the masses.

We should rebuild the Marine Spa and turn the Bay back into a genteel all-year-round spa for the well-heeled.

And while we're on the subject, there's the fencing around the harbourside and I might have put the balloon in there too, but I've changed my mind on that one. I like watching it floating up and down from my bedroom window. For one thing it acts as a weather vane. I can tell the wind direction and strength by the way it blows to one side on its tethers.

Water slides: See above.

Divorce: Pretty much always a bad thing, but made worse, personally, by the fact I'd just had a baby on my 42nd birthday.

It took me most of the decade to get over it and move on.

I must just add that despite my terrible grump here, there is always light at the end of the tunnel and I have been lucky enough to meet a wonderful, kind man who loves me and my nutty family.

Death and grieving: Again, pretty much always a bad thing. But we're getting there.

In a strange way the death of my children's father has brought us closer together, which I wouldn't have thought possible.

It has been horrible but I am very, very proud of the way all three of them are learning to cope.