I don't know when exactly it was, but at some point in the past few months, I forgot that Amy Winehouse was a real, 24-year-old girl from South London - and started to think she was a cartoon. She's joined some notional Public Figures Cartoon Network in my head - along with Boris Johnson, Hunter S. Thompson and Keith Richards. You know what I mean, don't you? When Keith Richards fell out of that coconut tree, we didn't think “Dear God. A 64-year-old man has fallen 20ft from a tree, possibly injuring his brain, on an island with primitive medical resources. That's terrible.”

Instead, we went: “Keef! You gravity-bothering legend! What are you going to fall out of next, eh? Your own mind? Hehehe! Siiiigh.”

And so it is with Winehouse. Back in 2006, the news that she had 1) contracted emphysema, 2) discharged herself from hospital, 3) gone to Glastonbury and 4) punched a fan in the face, would have been met with some genuine distress. “This is a life of terrible chaos and misery,” we would have thought. “Pray God our children's lives never go this way.”

In 2008, however - after umpteen such incidents - the response is different. It is, “Winehouse! Sounds like Darth Vader, swings like Rocky Balboa! She's a Flump-haired, one-woman Ragnarok! Amazing!”

Winehouse's life doesn't upset me any more. This is because, in my mind, every one of her days ends with the credits “©Hanna-Barbera 2008”. Crack, hospital, violence, husband in jail - you might as well try to make me worry about the misadventures of Top Cat. From what I can make out, she exists on one meal a day - Nik-Naks and Soleros, purchased from a petrol station at 5am - wears ballet slippers in winter, and lives in a bin in Camden. You see. Not real. She's Pippi Bongstocking. Little Orphan Gram-ie.

Last week, the papers pictured Mitch Winehouse, Amy's father, locking Winehouse in her flat. Of course, because Amy is a cartoon, she jumped out of a window and escaped in a friend's sports car, while wearing a dress a little too small for her - just like Wile E. Coyote.

Clearly, trying to stop Amy Winehouse from dying under a gigantic weight with “Crackme” written on the side of it is now totally beyond the Winehouse family. Just as it takes a village to raise a child, so it will now take this whole nation to save Amy Winehouse from her surreal nightmare and turn her back to flesh and blood again. I'm sure we've all got our own ideas of how we could straighten out Winehouse. Here are mine:

1)Get that woman an orphan. Although it is a theory that appears in no official literature on treating addiction, personality disorders, depression, hypermania or gigantic hair, popular culture teaches us that the best way to make the headstrong reassess their priorities is to land them with an orphan. Baby Boom, Annie, Pollyanna, Three Men and a Baby, My Two Dads - give a curmudgeon a kid and they'll be baking muffins and sighing within hours.

Of course, there is a matter of scale to address here. In Baby Boom, Diane Keaton had a single, winsome orphan's-worth of issues to address. Winehouse, by comparison, would probably need around 100 orphans. Indeed, we may need to look at procuring a second batch, at some point - should the initial village-full start to die from exposure/neglect/choking on black hairballs, etc.

There is an outside risk that Winehouse might be tempted to become some manner of beehived Fagin to the children. Sending them out to pick the pockets of the gentry to fund a limitless supply of heroin pies, crack sandwiches, etc. We'd need to keep an eye on that, and possibly consider:

Option 2) Sending Winehouse into space. Across all records on what it is like to go into orbit, there is the recurrent theme of humility, and perspective. “I put up my thumb and I blotted out the Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt tiny,” said Neil Armstrong. “It's hard to hold on to your problems when you're 150 miles up,” Buzz Aldrin added.

That's the kind of thoughts we need Winehouse to be having! Someone such as the Lord Mayor of London would be in charge of tugging Winehouse's rope twice a day, and shouting “Are you normal yet?” at her, until she replied in the affirmative. Then we'd bring her back down again.

I imagine the whole process would take no more than a week. And while the process was ongoing, I quite like the idea of us looking up and seeing Winehouse floating above us, like a giant stray fairground balloon - her faint mating cry of “Blaaaaaaaaaake!” softly carolling across the midsummer evenings.

3)Make her the new Doctor in Doctor Who. As debate rages as to who should be the new Doctor, the obvious answer stares us in the eye. Winehouse. Who knows what current combination of uppers, downers and lizard-drops she imbibes, but if you made her walk out of the Tardis on to the set of a hostile, alien planet, Winehouse would believe it to be totally real. No acting would be necessary as she fended off flying hordes of pig-faced bats of the planet Rac.

As the weeks went by, and Winehouse had to save the Earth from a series of formidable enemies, she would, surely, get her act together. By the end she'd be jogging, doing Su Doku, eating salad and wearing her hair in a neat bob. Or, maybe:

4)Something to do with the Third World. Not really sure what it should be - but going to the Third World always seems to sort people out. They come back with ratty friendship bracelets and their heads “in the right place”. You'd have to make sure it was one of those bits of the Third World that doesn't have gigantic fields of heroin growing in it, of course. That would mess things up a bit.