Sarah Todd: Ready to swap two wheels for a flying visit to foreign shores

Technically, it's gum ache, as the dentist has taken out a baby tooth that should have been safely tucked under my pillow about 30 years ago.

The latest suggested remedy is chewing on a clove of garlic first thing every morning. Yes, before anybody comments, a treatment that's unlikely to endear me to the fellow passengers on the aeroplane.

The children are so excited. It's not just the holiday, but the whole experience of flying and seeing "a proper blue sea". We probably should have taken them before, but because we haven't they're really going to remember this first foreign trip. Children nowadays are, on the whole, so blas about travel.

Like everybody with animals, the biggest hurdle to going away has been leaving them.

Our son is also worried about being parted from his bike. To be honest, he'd been a bit of a custard when it came to getting going on two wheels. While his sister would try, try and try again, he took some persuading to get back into the saddle after a fall. But now he's cracked it he's so proud of himself. You'd think he was the first person to learn to ride a bike. What's also helped has been spending time in the workshop customising an old cycle. He's between sizes, so Father Christmas decided not to get him a new one but to instead give him an air horn and other accessories to do-up an old one. The frame has been sprayed a bright red, while the handlebars and peddles are luminous green, with silver tape patching up the saddle nicely. He's absolutely capped with it.

A bit more tuned in to what other people think, his sister was taken aback when an older lad from school who'd just got (yet another) brand new bike declared it "really cool".

When my brother and I were children we were bike mad, peddling down the farm lane, cleaning and oiling them. Big brother added cow horn handlebars and goodness knows what else. It drives my father bananas if he ever sees children throwing their bikes on the floor, rather than putting them away properly. He, like so many of his generation, never had a new bike and would have looked after one like the crown jewels.

The old diaries are coming on holiday. More have been turned up and it's impossible to get the time to read them at home. On this date in 1910 they calved a heifer and loaded two carts full of potatoes before going to a family wedding. It was noted that "photos took" so presumably this was still pretty newsworthy.

That reminds me, now where's the camera?