Hooray for cricket

It's one of those days. Our tenants in London inform us their boiler's broken, our kitchen ceiling has an ominous leak, the car's playing up and we're nearly out of coal. A thick, cold fog envelopes our house and the kids get ratty.

Thank goodness my husband is working from home and thank Test Match Special for cricket. From the sunny climes of Dubai, via our invaluable internet radio, we hear the reassuring tones of England losing another test match and take a deep, calming breath.

Joe shows us how bowlers hold the ball: two fingers and a thumb pointing forward. "It's the sign for triceratops," he informs us.

Our landlady comes round and stabs our ceiling with a BBQ skewer, lancing the puddle of leaked water. She assures us that the plumber will fix it tomorrow. We arrange for a British Gas engineer to visit our tenants, book a coal delivery and send the car to the garage.

At some point, the sun manages to break out. We go outside to check the snowman and knock down some snow castles, and realise that the fog hasn't lifted - it's sunk... and we're now above it, looking across a shrouded valley to the next hillside.

I make a snowball to throw at Joe.

"Wait a minute," he says, and pops inside to get his cricket bat.

So I bowl snowballs at him, and I'm not sure what's more joyful: the snowball exploding on the upturned bucket stumps or Joe obliterating it with a straight drive.