Well, as I said I would last week, I compromised with the decorations, so our living room now looks grotto-like with coloured lights and shiny baubles.

The piece de resistance is a fibre optic village scene I found at the garden centre when we went to get the Christmas tree.

It has little houses, people and trees gathered around a river and once plugged in changes colour every few seconds.

It is so tacky it's actually quite nice, although daughter keeps referring to it as "that awful lump of plastic you bought."

You just can't please some people. I do taste and get told off, so I do tacky and still get moaned at.

The weather has got so cold now, hasn't it? Up to now daughter, like most teenagers, has been going off to get the bus each morning wearing an inadequate but trendy little jacket and insisting she's warm enough, even when it has been really windy and raining.

Even she has felt the chilly weather enough this week to come home the other day saying "it must be illegal for it to be this cold" and to start rummaging through the wardrobe for a warmer coat.

"You haven't got one," I reminded her. "You refused to have one because you said you didn't need one when I tried to buy you one. You said your jacket was perfectly warm enough and that if I bought you a proper coat you wouldn't wear it anyway and if I made you, you would probably leave it on the bus because only sad people wear coats so I decided to save my money. Don't you remember?"

She didn't remember, of course, and insisted the cold and accompanying sniffles she had just caught was a direct result of my failing to clothe her adequately.

Is absolutely everything down to me? Obviously it is. She has however agreed to come into town with me at the weekend and be bought a proper school coat.

In the meantime she is wearing an old coat of mine which, after she had caused some havoc by getting everything out of my wardrobe, she pronounced as being acceptable in the short term.

She is also wearing a scarf and woolly gloves although I haven't been able to persuade her to wear a vest yet.

She must be hoping for something really good for her Christmas present this year as she has started behaving extremely well recently.

Each evening she has done her homework promptly and then after dinner has come out with strange and previously unheard of phrases such as "I'll just go and wash up and clean the kitchen" and "I'm just going upstairs to sort my bedroom out."

This is odd as well as unusual and there just has to be an ulterior motive behind it. She even remembered the other day both to feed the dog and not leave the empty dog food can in the sink and to empty the bin.

I am tempted to delay Christmas by a month until the end of January so we can enjoy this changed behaviour for a bit longer.