Well the holidays are well and truly over and didn’t the summer just fly. Apart from a few outings, I spent my two weeks off just messing around at home, making big dinners and baking. I’m not a great tourist and all I wanted from my holiday was to relax and do next to nothing.

Usually I watch little or no television but as the weather was changeable, there were mornings when I just chilled out on the couch with a nice cup of tea and a slice of my sponge cake and watched reruns of I Dream of Jeanie and Bewitched. I haven’t seen either programme for years, yet they still make me laugh. Larry Hagman is a howl as the astronaut whose genie gets him into all sorts of trouble.

I willed the counters to fall in Tipping Point and pitted my wits against the word wizards on Countdown. I also kept an eye on how Deal or no Deal was working out – what a simple formula for a programme that can really draw you in.

I cried every time Davina McCall and Nicky Campbell reunited families on ITV’s Long Lost Families. This is a programme that really pulls at the heartstrings and I’d dare anyone not to cry when watching. Most of those reunited are the birth mothers and adult children they gave up for adoption as babies.

The stories the women tell of being pressurised to give up their babies, of dressing them for the last time and handing them over to strangers, are exactly the same as the stories we’ve been listening to here. But it seems much easier to trace your birth mother in the UK.

For so many of the older women, there was a deep need to know that life had worked out well for their child and that they had made the right decision on their behalf. Wanting to know why they were given up for adoption was uppermost in the minds of the adult children. I thought the saddest cases were where parents had gone on to marry and have more children. Hearing this was always difficult for the child that was given up, no matter how well their life had turned out.

Of course, all this telly watching and eating sponge cake was bound to end in trouble and so it did. I got on the scales at the end of my holidays to discover I had put on nine pounds. Honestly, I’d hardly convert as well if I was a little Angus heifer being fattened for the factory.

Of course it wasn’t just the sponge cake and general idleness that was to blame. Since losing two and a half stone over a period of two years, I’ve kept a tight rein on what I eat and I exercise a couple of times a week. For my two weeks’ holidays, I abandoned all such good behaviour, knowing full well that I’d put up a bit of weight – but I never thought it would amount to nine pounds.

It goes to show that if you want to stay healthy and keep weight under control, you have to work at it. All of the time.

Lesson learned.