LIKE Wizzard the girl wishes it could be Christmas every day, or rather she expects it to be Christmas every day. Every morning since the 25th she has woken up and been disappointed to find that Santa has not left any more presents.

We tell her it's because she wasn't very good the previous day. The tactic will either mean she becomes a very well-behaved child or she will spend a fortune on therapy in adult life.

My intention this week had been to write something uplifting to mark the start of a new year - a column that would reflect the joy, the opportunities and the love that 2016 will no-doubt bring.

I wanted to capture in words that feeling that this could be the best year ever for the family - the girl starting school, the oldest boy becoming a man, the two boys in the middle finally managing to eat a whole box of Coco Pops in under 24 hours.

But then I watched the dog try in vain to find patch of dry grass to do its business on in what was once the garden but is now a muddy puddle and that fleeting feeling of optimism disappeared.

Will 2016 be the wettest in the Dales since the notorious year of 14,369BC when as well as the problem of melting glaciers, the area's population of 12 had to contend with heavy thunderstorms throughout April?

Of course they didn't know it was April or that it was even thunder - thinking the noise was probably the Gods arguing after a bad-tempered game of Hungry Hippos - but that did not stop the natives being really cheesed off that there was nowhere dry to sit down.

Despite the sodding sodden conditions, we decided to venture out at the weekend in order to prevent everyone getting ex-council house fever which is similar to cabin fever, only more likely to end in Chinese burns and wedgies.

Geocaching is the latest craze in our house. It's a cross between hiking and a treasure hunt - you follow GPS coordinates on a smart phone or similar device to find Tupperware boxes hidden in walls or buried at the bottom of trees stumps.

The best thing about geocaching, other than it's free, is that boring family walks are transformed into Famous Five-style mini-adventures that, if planned correctly, end with lemonade and a packet of Seabrook's finest in a warm Dales pub.