BRACE yourselves, get a stiff drink and sit down on a comfy chair, because I have bad news.

This week, after almost three years, is the last time time I'll be penning a column for the Wezzy Gezzy.

I'm incredibly sad to be saying goodbye to this little outlet for my thoughts - or 'public marriage counselling service' as a friend put it - but I have a toddler and can barely remember my own name these days so it seemed like the right time to hand the reins over to someone else.

I really have loved writing it though, and consequently have spent a lot of time thinking about what my last 350 words should be about.

Regular readers will know that my favourite subjects - which I could talk about for hours - are all the ways in which my husband drives me crackers.

In more recent times I've expanded my repertoire and can now wax lyrical about attending toddler classes, chasing a toddler round the house, bribing a toddler to eat vegetables and - my favourite - drinking wine straight from the bottle with a straw.

But none of the things I would normally have written about seemed quite right.

For example, I could have told you that 10 people arrived for a barbecue at the weekend just as Smithy remembered he'd taken the most important piece of equipment to the tip last summer after it went rusty.

Or that Smithy decided, after a three week foray, that gardening 'isn't for him' and that plastic plants and flowers shoved in the soil are a perfectly adequate alternative.

But I wanted my last column to be meaningful; to have purpose, and in the end Smithy himself provided the answer.

"As something of a celebrity among Gazette readers, I feel I ought to pass on some words of wisdom to your successor," he said, shovelling Coco Pops into his mouth. "Or to be precise - to your successor's wife."

He put down the spoon and looked me in the eye.

"I should tell her this," he said darkly, "The poor woman's life is no longer her own."

So there you go. And for the sake of marital harmony, it's probably best I stop writing now..