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What is it about the cheerful Christmas ditty Jingle Bells that makes it such a target for alternative lyrics? For some reason, Jingle Bells alone among all the festive tunes is constantly being regenerated into fabulous ‘new versions’, mainly by my children and all their schoolmates. It is driving me so crazy that I find myself festively shouting at them the moment they start, at which point they protest that they were going to sing the proper version. Current non-proper versions include the time-honoured ‘Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin flew away’ that was doing the rounds even when I were a lass, and one that my eldest son crafted with a school friend that goes: Jingle Bells, schoo-ool smells, I’d rather run away. Ireland Wales, I don’t really care where I stay’. We had a chat yesterday about scansion but he did not, sadly, go away and rewrite it. Meanwhile, the other boy has come home with a verse in which ‘Uncle Billy lost his willy on the motorway’ – not a great image to take away, especially when presented by a 6 year old. A third favourite involves Robin laying an egg, but it falls down at the next line, because it’s hard to engineer a rhyme for ‘egg’ into the right place.

We are all off this afternoon to watch the girl in her nursery nativity play. This will, of course, involve a whole-nursery rendition of the aforementioned song, accompanied by the lovely Tarquin on his guitar. I am not sure whether to bribe or threaten the boys to stop them joining in with their own special lyrics. But no doubt the nursery children will have made up their own, anyway.

Cornwall is very hilly. This surprised me when I arrived here fifteen months ago. I had vaguely assumed that places that were near the sea were flat, probably because I grew up in Norfolk, where the wind, unfailingly described as ‘from Siberia’, cuts across miles and miles of non-undulating fields, pinches your cheeks and steals your woolly hat. The only exception is when it’s summer and there’s a bit of dust in the air, in which case the wind comes ‘straight from the Sahara’, a description that adds a touch of foreign glamour to the grit that gets in your eyes.

In fact, in France we lived in the Landes region, which is also both coastal and flat, but in the Landes’ case, the monotony is relieved by pine forests so endless that they are, in fact, completely monotonous. The landscape was so uniformly flat that the smallest hill would have me reaching for the camera in my excitement, and in the end it all got too much and we had to leave.

In any case, I have been surprised by Cornwall. I go out running from time to time, mainly as a way of escaping the house and spending some peaceful time looking at the sea. It is impossible to go for a run without tackling hills, and I rarely manage a run without a spell of walking up a gradient. Walking the children to school involves all of us struggling up a huge hill on the way there, and then there is another on the way back. A couple of weekends ago I did a half marathon for the first time, and there was truly not a single flat stretch. It was at the Eden Project and I entered because I thought it sounded cool, doing a half marathon at the Eden Project, but in fact the course covered village after village, farmyard after farmyard, that nestled in the hills around it. I expected 13 hilly miles to be tough, and indeed my expectation was met, but I had reckoned without the camaraderie, the people standing in the drizzle beside a muddy Cornish track, applauding complete strangers running by, the feeling that if you saw another runner for a second time, you were old friends with each other. My time was not earth shattering – I ran half a marathon in longer than it takes Paula Radcliffe to run a whole one – but I got to the end, and raised nearly £400 for Muscular Dystrophy research as I went (this is a cause that is dear to my heart as it is a condition that has affected the children of a school friend of mine this year, and it really is every parent’s deepest, darkest nightmare).

I’ve only been out running once since, however, and I’ve been avoiding the walk to school when I can. I’d like to do another half marathon next year, but am scouring the internet for one that is at quite a distance from Cornwall, possibly in somewhere flat like Norfolk or the Landes.

Other than that, I have recently complained to the PCC about Jan Moir, along with everyone else, and been to my husband’s school in the guise of ‘person who knows more than he does about music’ to get his class drumming and clapping in time to a Moroccan song called ‘Ali baba’, which has an irritatingly catchy tune that has been in my head day and night ever since. I started writing a radio play (uncommissioned, on a whim). I assisted my eldest son in some secret agent missions on Club Penguin – a sentence that will only mean anything to anyone with a child between the ages of 6 and 10. I helped my children’s school with a book they’re putting together.

In short, I have been filling my time with anything and everything to avoid getting down to work properly on my new novel. I’ll do it next week, except I won’t because it’s half term. So I’ll do it the week after. How’s that for a chillingly-efficient action plan?