Dom Joly: I clean up at sport of kings but disaster strikes in 'Secret Valley'

Somehow, the Christmas holidays in the Joly household seem to consist of nothing but races of different kinds. My wife Stacey bought some wind-up racehorses that you use on the dining-room table. These turned out to be a fantastic family icebreaker. The normally reserved and estranged factions of the Joly family were soon screaming and shouting at their little horses and urging them on to victory while throwing £10 notes on to the table with gay abandon. I'd secretly tested all the nags the previous day and had discovered that one grey ("I loathe people who call horses white, there are no white horses, only greys," screamed one of my kids' honorary grandmothers at one point) was particularly fast and steady on its little plastic feet.

I made a killing and managed to recoup most of the cost of Christmas from my feverish and drunken family of amateur gamblers. Once the feeding had ceased we withdrew to the "drawing room" (known as the TV room to our branch) where one of the big presents of the holidays – Mario Karts – was to be christened. We had been suckered into the purchase by the TV ads showing just how happy the Redknapp family seemed to be.

This happiness, the ad implied, was due almost entirely to Mario Karts on the Wii. Personally, if I was Jamie Redknapp and married to Louise then I wouldn't be wasting my time on video games – I'd be upstairs playing Mr Wobbly hides his helmet. But each to their own. When you play Mario Karts on the Wii, you all have little wireless steering wheels that you spin around in the air to control your Nintendo racing creature. You all look totally insane, especially to elderly relatives who, unlike Harry Redknapp, have no intention of playing this game. They choose simply to sit and tut-tut and wonder whether this is what they'd fought a war for. We loved the game, however, and didn't even notice when most of the family finally slipped out of the house at about six in the evening.

We found a note by the door telling us that they were off to the races the next day and had to get home to find some more money from somewhere so that they could lose it all over again on proper horses.

We were not going to the races. We were off to the "Secret Valley" – this is a hidden valley near us that has a totally private and unused tarmac road winding through a stunning Cotswold valley up to a little farmhouse. We have used this road ever since we moved down here for bicycle training, off-road driving, Vespa speed trials, dog-frisbee distance competitions... It's the perfect venue for all our needs and we've never been troubled by anyone. Come Boxing Day we were off to road-test the new remote-controlled cars both our kids had received. The packaging warned us that they were very fast and we were eager to try them out.

We got to the "Secret Valley" (don't tell anyone about it, will you?) and unpacked the cars. They were fairly sizeable and took a little while to prepare. After about 20 minutes, however, we got the green light from the pits and we were ready to start our engines. We lined the two cars up side by side on the little tarmac road and then we all climbed up to the top of a steep hill to oversee the race.

On my command the kids hit the go switch and the two cars rocketed off like a pair of demented drag racers. A flock of sheep who had been grazing peacefully by a babbling brook hotfooted it out of the way as the cars roared past. As they reached the steep right turn, my boy's blue car was just ahead. Suddenly, disaster – from round the corner appeared a mud-spattered Land Rover that crunched over both cars with seemingly military precision. The driver, a rather threatening-looking local yokel, got out to see what he'd hit.

We didn't hang around to explain. As if one, the family bolted into the woods and ran round to where we'd left our real car. We roared off down the Roman road towards home. Two miles from base I spotted a souped-up Subaru that I would have normally done my very best to overtake and humiliate. Not today – we'd had enough of races for the time being. A roaring fire and bread sauce sandwiches beckoned.

'Winter Wonderland' cuts no ice so I give appalling surface the chop

What is it with ice-skating in the UK? No wonder we're not turning out any more Torvill and Deans. We went to a local "Winter Wonderland" event that promised a gorgeous, floodlit ice rink.

What we got was a tiny fenced-off enclosure that seemed to have plastic chopping boards for a surface. This, we were informed was something called "gel-ice". It was absolutely appalling – kids were stumbling about on crap skates and falling over everywhere. Meanwhile adults in normal shoes were simply walking about and picking up their stressed charges.

I asked the organiser how he justified this bollocks experience. He was obviously terrified of being labelled as another "Crapland" and waffled on about how useful it was as you couldn't guarantee cold enough weather for real ice, etc. Next year I'm just going to go to the Boxing Day sales at our local kitchen megastore and buy a job lot of chopping boards – hey presto, it's the Cotswolds on ice...ish.

Give me a loan and you won't be cheesed off

Thank you, whoever you were, for your generous bid of £1,200 to join me in cheese rolling. At that price I can guarantee a decent write-up of your cheese-rolling abilities as well as lashings of local ale – you couldn't lend me some money could you? I'm a bit short right now. I'll pay you back...