Following a serendipitous meeting in a bar, I was invited to join the Clipper Round the World Yacht Race crews in Marina at Keppel Bay during their stopover in Singapore. Sandy, the kids and I went aboard the Visit Finland yacht and were amazed at the sheer scale of the 68-foot-long racing yacht. The boats are large but they've been stripped out for racing with no luxuries at all. Ten canvas cloth bunks sleep up to twenty crew, in two shifts, and wet wipes make do for showers at sea. After a quick interview for a Nat Geo documentary on the race and a picnic on the grass facing the marina, I dropped by the race office to give the race office manager a gift from Monsoon Books: "The Boat: Singapore Escape, Cannibalism at Sea"!

Dickens 2012 is a worldwide celebration of the life and work of Charles Dickens to mark the bicentenary of his birth. In Singapore, the British Arts Council is putting on a number of events in early February. For more information, click here.

One of Monsoon's authors, Alison Jean Lester, is the great great great-granddaughter of Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne, Charles Dickens's illustrator). Apparently, Phiz and novelist William Makepeace Thackeray both submitted portfolios of their work to Dickens's publisher and Dickens chose the drawings of Phiz. Phiz went on to illustrate ten of Dickens's books.

The bicentenary is a good excuse to revisit or discover afresh the works of Dickens. I've been listening to audiobook recordings of A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, A Christmas Carol and Nicholas Nickleby on my iPhone while jogging home from the office. Probably not how Dickens envisaged his work would be enjoyed.

Sandy's dinner date duly postponed, she acquiesced to accompany yours truly for a simple Chinese meal with the kids to celebrate nine years of marriage. When we explained the reason for the dinner to Olive, she said: "Mummy, when you get married again can I wear a princess dress?" Gee, thanks kid.

Happy 9th Anniversary Sandy! I love you very much ... and Olive can dress like a princess when we celebrate 10 years next year! (Not in the local Chinese restaurant.)

Oh, the dilemmas of a parent ... This morning’s dilemma — there are several a day — is concerning sweets or candy. Olive has just started at a new preschool and now takes a school bus to kindergarten. It’s a small bus, actually an MPV, and she has close friends on the bus, and a very kind driver and a ‘bus aunty’ to look after the kids. The problem is the bus aunty dishes out candy to the toddlers every day and even helps the little ones unwrap the sweets. We consider this rather odd but evidently we are alone. We only allow Olive to eat sweets as a treat, she has to understand they are not things to consume daily.

So, what do we do? After two days we asked the bus aunty not to give our daughter sweets and this morning Olive alighted from the bus looking very sad and said Aunty So and So didn’t give her a sweet but all the other kids received one. OK, I can see we made a mistake there. It must be pretty traumatizing to be excluded like that. Do we plant a banana grove and offer to supply the bus aunty with fruit for the kids? Do we tell the bus aunty she can give Olive a sweet but she must ask Olive to put it in her pocket to take home? We could then make a game of collecting all the sweets at home in a jar and just give her one on special occasions? Or are we just food Nazis and we should allow, even encourage, our kids to eat junk food?

Best movie of 2011:

Best dining experience:

The highlight of the year was walking up through a forest with Phil, Susie, Jaques, Rose and Pomme to a medieval chapel at the top of a hill in Alsace, France, where, on weekends, a medieval-looking lady serves starters of local toxic cheese, wild boar jambon and cured pork belly and for main course an incredibly delicious, creamy tarte flambée, a local Alsace pizza (Alsatian pizza might upset some readers). Washed down with white beer from over the mountain range in Germany this was a perfect dinner. For pudding we piled into Phil's Landrover, headed up the side of another hill, drove off-road into a field with spectacular views across the valley and parked under a cherry tree. As the sun was setting we wound down the windows, reached out and had our fill of fruit.

Best holiday:

Oh, that's easy. My surprise 40th in Sri Lanka. Sandy told me to keep 10 days free in Feb for a surprise holiday to celebrate my 40th birthday. I arrived at the airport with no idea of the destination and no clue as to what Sandy and the kids had planned for me. I guess I imagined we would pop up to Thailand or down to Bali, but at Changi airport we checked onto an Emirates flight to Dubai via Colombo. Three hours later, at 3am, we disembarked at Colombo and checked into a hotel near the airport. No Dubai then. I thought perhaps we would transfer to the Maldives but we were met by a car and driver in the morning and we took the coastal road south of Colombo. We were going to Galle! The trip down to Galle took longer than the flight from Singapore and I had only slept one hour in the last two days. By the time we finally pulled up at a huge villa and were greeted by the staff I was a walking zombie. The driver pointed into the entrance hall where a "Happy Birthday" banner was hanging and for a second I couldn't think whose birthday it was. But that wasn't the surprise. I caught sight of people moving towards me from the side of the room and ... there was my sister Holly with Nel, Oscar and Ralph, and my parents! Ooooooh my god! As you can imagine, it was all rather emotional.

Favourite You Tube spoof:

First for the real video: an English guy is caught on camera running after his dog, Fenton, who is happily chasing deer in Richmond Park, London.

The original video above spawned loads of hilarious spoof videos involving Fenton the dog and his unfortunate owner. Two of the best are:

Olive's dreams were realised last night when she played in her very first fake snow.