NORTHERN PLANNER

There hasn't been much luck in the Northern household. While we're all struggling with various stages of chest infections, our boiler has decided to die during the coldest temperatures we ever get in the UK. Our house is FREEZING.

While our dead boiler gets replaced, my ill little boy is staying with his Grandparents, along with the wife, while at night I huddle in front of the fire with enough layers of clothes to clothe a football stadium.

So here's to the things we don't notice and appreciate enough – family, boilers and simple heat. We're very lucky to live in the times we do, or some of us are at least.

Also, here's to people who work with their hands. Without our engineer who, thankfully is a friend of the family, we would be stuffed. I wish this kind of thing would happen to cooler, more rock star type people working in adland, might remind them how perfectly useless what we do really is, next to the stuff that really matters.