The Daughter is toying with the idea of a rabbit for Christmas but every time my mouse hovers over the buy button for the on-line hutch, she has another change of heart.

I too am undecided about the wisdom of a creature for life and not just for Christmas. I had a succession of furry bundles as I was growing up which I promised to love for all time, and then ignored diligently while Dad spent years de-icing the daily water and shovelling droppings from a snow-bound enclosure.

Mice might be easier to keep. The Youngest drops enough coco-pops under the tables each morning to feed an entire nation of desperate rodents.

This makes me glad I no longer live in an old house where the onset of winter heralds a tidal wave of scurrying beneath your feet and where festive slippers require sturdy toe protection because, alongside holly, candles, and mince pies for Santa, the house also becomes decorated with little cheese traps for Mickey and Minnie.

We already have a pair of ageing goldfish whose swivelling eyes make me feel guilty every time I pass their pea-soup bowl though, sorrowfully, many generations of stick insects recently ended their family tree on festering privet, freeze-dried like Matchmakers on the kitchen windowsill.

We’ve had ants too – a free-range ant colony on The Middle One’s bedroom carpet. I had, admittedly, agreed he could collect some but had naively envisaged that they and their accompanying garden mulch might have resided in some kind of vessel or other. I’d even been so foolish as to imagine a lid. The ants all disappeared rapidly into the house’s infrastructure to the bitter disappointment of The Middle One, and I lasted three days before calling the hoover in.

Other village children seem to have all manner of interesting animals and in order to keep up with the Joneses (and the Brownses in particular) there’s a bit of me that thinks we should go radical with a big cat or a great ape. But with animals, like children, you don’t always get what you bargained for.

Over the summer, a trip to Knowsley Safari Park went horribly wrong when the adorable monkeys parading delicately over the bonnet in a well-schooled crocodile were in fact a burly baboon mafia, baring their sharp yellow teeth through the windscreen.

I left the enclosure at speed with evil King Kong still on the roof vindictively stripping the metallic trim, the rubber water-squirters from the wipers dangling from his rabid mouth, rangers in hot pursuit. I’m still disturbed by them in my sleep, the attacking baboons unfortunately not the hot rangers.

And now my nightmares are ravaged by a new terror: The Daughter’s proposed Christmas bunny transforming into Wallace and Grommit’s Wererabbit beneath the fairy-lights. Perhaps I’ll hold off on the hutch for now....