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Friday 14 October 
NiCole Robinson (and that's how she spells it) is pregnant. Or at least she was when she filmed season six of The West Wing. She plays the redoubtable Margaret, formerly Leo's assistant, now CJ's, and when she turned to the side in episode 12 (365 Days, by Mark Goffman), you could clearly see her bump. How exciting. I wonder if they'll work it into the story, or just have her wear roomier clothes?

Haircut this morning, with a new stylist, Mel. She did a good job, so I think I'll stick with her. I was unlucky enough at the sinks to sit next to a woman having perm solution washed out. What a high and unnatural chemical smell that is. I had a Proustian rush - it took me back to childhood when Auntie Janice used to come round of a Thursday during the school holidays and do Mum and Nan and the other Janis's hair. Interestingly, as I walked down Reigate High Street afterwards, the drains were being unblocked at Ask, the pizza restaurant. It smelt exactly the same as perm solution.

Friday afternoon treat: Wallace & Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit. I've loved their previous adventures, although this was the first feature-length one. Terrific. Funny all the way through, and with plenty to tickle the adult palate (when Wallace is naked - it's a long story - Gromit covers his embarrassment with a cardboard box, and on the box is a sticker saying, "May contain nuts"). Sound plotting, truly inventive and exciting too. It's heartwarming to know that a film this English can top the US box office, without making any concessions beyond an incidental mention of Monterey Jack. It got five stars in the Independent and the Guardian . You'd have to be a right grump not to love it. Great to hear Nicholas Smith (Mr Rumbold from Are You Being Served?) voicing the vicar. Incidentally, before the film, the cinema staff announced that it was a girl called Chloe's birthday and made her come to the front to collect her free ice cream while we all sang Happy Birthday. Typical of Reigate Screen. You wouldn't get that at your multiplex. (Chloe was all shy.)

Saturday 15 October
Dreaming a lot lately, just before waking up. This one was odd: Andre Paine, who does music news on 6 Music, asked me if he could hold a painting class in my back garden. I say Andre Paine, but he was also a sub-editor called Michael who used to work on Q in the mid-90s (you know how people get mixed together in dreams). Anyway, I said yes. Then he warned me that it was a life class, in other words they would be painting a nude model. I wondered what the neighbours would think, but still said it would be OK. We wandered down the garden to have a look at the spot. Naturally, the garden was far longer than it is in real life. Along the way, Andre/Michael explained that it was a gay painting class and that everybody would be nude. This didn't bother me either. When we get to the end of the garden, via an erroneous courtyard, it turned out to be like an underground cave, with a small lake in the middle, which was all brown with mud and had what appeared to be an underground spring in it, bubbling away. I was embarrassed because it was all untidy - there was an old, wet dressing gown just lying there on the ground. As I dipped a toe in the water, I woke up. I apologise to Andre Paine, if he's reading this, for dreaming about him, even though we have barely exchanged a word in the 6 Music office.

Waking The Dead tonight, but not a current one, the pilot episode from 2000 which comes in the first-series box set. It was odd to see it finding its way, but apart from the lack of a permanent set, the familiar theme tune and those Seven-style credits, all the characteristics were in place, not least the friction and shouting within the team. Trevor Eve had no beard, and Wil Johnson's frown was a work-in-progress. Followed, after a brief interlude with Parkinson (missed Lucas and Walliams, caught more of Will Young than I'd have liked), a glimpse of Spoons, I fell back on Curb and did two episodes back-to-back (the one with the golf club in the casket and the one with the prostitute in the car pool lane - pure genius).

Sunday 16 October
Another glorious, hot sunny day. Richard Herring was back. He seemed slightly out of sorts when he arrived, perhaps hungover or just tired from gigging too much and trying to get into fights with hecklers, or feeling under pressure because he's taken on too much work. (It's all in his blog ) Anyway, once we got into the Sunday papers, his blues were transported away. It really is a tonic. We giggled like schoolboys a bit too much at the otherwise quite serious photograph in the Mirror of a Polish nurse (now ex-nurse) posing with a baby from an incubator in her pocket. Clearly this was a stupid and potentially dangerous thing to do, but the picture made us laugh. I hope we didn't offend. I am offended by the hysterical coverage of Avian Flu. The disease has reached Romania and, aptly enough, Turkey (albeit not in a turkey), but the hysteria is already in the UK and spreading like a virus. All the papers were trying to outdo each other on the scaremongering, using estimates and projections to put the nation in a panic. I can't remember the last time I read so many news stories with the words "if" and "might" and "could" in them. This is not news, this is speculation. I'm not saying there isn't a mutated flu virus in birds in Asia and beyond, I'm just saying that it isn't going to kill everybody in Britain. If you read beyond the headlines (QUEEN TO GET FIRST BIRD FLU PILL, screams the Express , although I'm sure it isn't a pill, rather an injection; BRITAIN TO CLOSE ALL BORDERS, fantasises my ex-employer the Mail On Sunday), you get closer to the truth: that only 60 people in the whole wide world have died so far, and that's since 2003, and that the flu drugs they keep mentioning don't really work, they just reduce the amount of time you get flu by about a day, and that 30 million people died of flu in 1918 because we'd just had a world war in Europe, more people lived in poverty and without proper sanitation, and most of the 30 million died in India. I'm not saying a life matters more or less wherever it ends, I'm just saying that the world was a very different place then. And was it all over the newspapers? Apparently not. And about 18,000 people die of ordinary man-and-lady flu each winter in this country, or flu-related illness, and that's well over a third of the most common bird flu prediction of 50,000. Sit tight, eat lots of green vegetables, get some exercise, take the news with a pinch of salt (not with the vegetables) and don't touch any woozy looking ducks.

A brand new Waking The Dead followed by 15 minutes of Spider-Man before I was too tired to carry on.

Monday 17 October 
Autumnal melancholy. Just before I work, I dreamed I was showing Stuart Maconie Northampton. It was unlike Northampton in the real world; indeed, it was an architectural wonder, like some fine European capital, except modern and iconoclastic in its design. A city of the future that would win awards. Stuart was impressed. We attempted to find the Sainsbury's I used to work at in 1981 but it wasn't there, even though we entered the Grosvenor Centre by the service entrance I used as a Sainsbury's employee.

Back in the real world: I walked into Reigate for some chips. Imported the new Fall album onto my iPod, plus some Age Of Chance tracks that a kind listener called Mark E sent to me at 6 Music (his website is here). Watched Elusive Peace on BBC2, this week about President Bush's role in the Arab-Israeli peace process. Early night.

Tuesday 18 October
The temperature really dropped today. Meeting at Radio Times. You'd be surprised how little I venture into their offices, despite the preponderance of my grinning face on that red chair throughout the magazine. It's nice to see Sue and the team. (They do all the hard work; I just grin from the page.) Excuse brief entries this week; I am pouring my energies into other things and I have a two-day trip to Northampton upon me. Property Ladder (with this insane woman with the masterplan of turning a three-bedroom house in Hendon into a landlord's dream: ten bedrooms, including two in the shed and one in the garage - I kid you not) and Waking The Dead (slightly underwhelming conclusion to Sunday night's - why did the killer get off on drowning women? They never actually explained it).

Wednesday 19 October
Lunch with Alan Musa, Vice President of the classic-movie channel TCM (he's slightly embarrassed about the title - his mum thinks he's done well for himself in American politics). I'm hosting the TCM Classic Shorts awards at the London Film Festival in two weeks' time, which is not an award for the most classic pair of shorts, but the best short film.

The shortlist of six is very impressive. So, I met up with the PR, Ann, for a full briefing, and was then kindly taken for lunch by Alan, who's a similar vintage to me, and grew up in Liverpool, which put him in the right place to see Echo & The Bunnymen at Eric's and find himself having a pint "with the Wild Swans on one side and the Pale Fountains on the other" in the early 80s when that city was centre of the raincoat universe, which makes me retroactively jealous. He took me to Vasco & Piero's, the bijou Italian where Gordon Brown was once snapped with his then-girlfriend-now-wife-future-First-Lady Sarah Macauley. It's rare I get taken for lunch and enjoyed eating small portions, well garnished, with a carpaccio of pineapple for afters. Then I hopped on a train to Northampton. I'm picking up my boots and going back to my roots. £21.80 return but Silverlink seem to have replaced their crappy old trains. Facing backwards for most of the journey, as is my instinct (read into that what you will), I actually switched seats once past Wolverton so I could face forward and watch Northampton draw closer. Sentimental fool. It comes upon you very quickly.

Always nice to see Mum and Dad but this time I got to see the whole of my sister's family too, as William, her youngest, was three yesterday and I hand-delivered his present. Naturally he went all shy, as kids do, but I think he liked the books and sticker albums and Madagascar card. I left him and his two older brothers watching some noisy, WWF wrestling.

Watched The Daily Show, What Not To Wear (why do these women put themselves through such ritual humiliation?), and Lost and ate too many macadamia nuts and cranberries. Well, they were just sitting there! Asking to be eaten! (Before you ask, I don't sleep in my childhood bed when I stay here. That's been converted into an office, which is where I'm typing from. I sleep in what used to be my brother's room. It's odd having a street light right outside the window. We don't have street lighting in Reigate.)

Thursday 20 October
Up early. Main purpose of visit: an invite to come and speak to sixth formers at Wrenn School in neighbouring Wellingborough. The talk was all set up by Kirsty, the Specialist Schools Co-ordinator (a very modern thing to have at a school), an upbeat and helpful woman. Some of the kids came of their own volition, others were coerced into it, but it was a packed library and all seemed interested enough in the story of my 17 jobs in 17 years since college. I considered writing notes for the talk, but, as usual, dispensed with the idea and busked it. You don't want a speaker who keeps looking down at pieces of paper. You want a speaker who looks you in the eye. I looked them in the eye for 45 minutes, making my throat dry with talk. I tried to divine nuggets of useful careers advice from my own haphazard, indecisive, slaloming career. One of them is: whatever you think you want to do for a job, you probably won't end up doing it. If you want something, just ask - you never know. There's no such thing as going on the wrong college course - go to college and find out what you don't want to do. And if you want to write, just write. I fielded questions for 20 minutes and a few kids stayed behind to take pictures of me on their mobile phones because I have appeared on The 100 Greatest Pop Videos and that makes me famous. One kid, aged 17 (is that a kid?) called Liam was keen to show me his poetry. He stood there while I read it, which was brave. These were some serious, deep, emotional poems about his mum dying. I congratulated him. He told me Ronnie Barker was his hero and he's started writing sketches. He may go far. He asked me to sign his folder, which was sweet.

Back at Mum and Dad's for midday as a BBC camera crew (director, camera, lights) were arriving from London to film me for a pilot documentary called The Time Of Our Lives, about ordinary people and their ordinary memories and ordinary cine film from the last 50 years. We filmed in Mum and Dad's living room. It involved them projecting actual cine footage from my childhood (Simon's christening; Uncle Brian's wedding etc.) onto a screen while Dad and I watched and chatted, trying to ignore the camera. This was hugely entertaining, as I hadn't seen the footage for years. (Mum was out, but she would have been more shy about being filmed anyway.) Then I had to do a piece to camera, explaining what the series was about ("It's these shared memories that show not just how much our own lives have changed, but how much Britain has"). The whole thing took about five hours. It was quite exhausting. I'm doing the voiceover next week in London. I hope they get a series.

Mentally drained. Back to London tomorrow. I'm sitting in the office that used to be my teenage bedroom and I'm looking at a montage of family photos Mum and Dad have arranged in a clip-frame and boy, my hair is big in the 80s. What an idiot.

The views expressed are Andrew Collins' and not necessarily those of the BBC .