I am photographed with 72 toilet rolls

Happy New Year readers! I hope you had a merry Christmas, and that any fissures within the family didn't turn into canyons full of rancour. Apologies to anyone visiting here around the end of the year: I made a bit of a hash of transferring the site to a new hosting provider.

I am one of the possibly irritating people who consistently report a genuinely happy Christmas. We have settled on a formula now, with a timetable that hardly changes except for the inherent unpredictability of ovens, although I decided this year that I would go down the pub while they were watching Call The Midwife, which I find unbearably twee and woke. I got delightfully stuck in, so to speak, between two female strangers at the Old Shipbuilder’s Arms.

On 27th I participated in a "fun" run as a fundraiser for Women's Aid. It was a course of 2.13 miles, slightly shortened from the original plan due to frost. After ten minutes or so, I was plotting how to escape the course and go home, feeling that I didn't have enough puff in me. I also had a knicker elastic problem; jog, jog, jog, down, down, down came my pants, to the stage where underneath my joggers my bum cheeks were exposed like someone in an experimental dance company, while at the front the pants clung on by using my willy as a hook.

But I made it, about 125th out of 150, in an arrière-garde of the obese and the over-70s, and collected my little Christmas tree medal. I was almost disgusted with myself how difficult I found it, so have been out a couple of times since then, with the aim of covering two miles without having a near-death experience.

So if anyone has a bit of excess cash looking for a good home, email me by clicking here, and I'll send you the link to the site where you can divert your bothersome lucre to Women's Aid. Remember to click "custom amount" at the foot of the page to avoid getting skimmed by the site's owner.

The start date for my new job at the hospital seems to recede endlessly. I had to have a couple of blood tests and injections before they can start me, but, as the chatty nurse told me as I was about to leave, "part of this, really, is to see if you wash and look after yourself."

I am now vaccinated against diseases I have never heard of, and can have sex with a prossie, a man and a cow simultaneously without coming to harm. The information sheet they gave me told me to avoid any heavy lifting for a few hours afterwards, which is a pity as I was planning to move some annoying boulders from my vestibule that afternoon.

Instead, I was asked to pose next to seventy-two toilet rolls (they're cheaper in bulk). The manager of my block of flats looked curiously on.