I have just been out for a night run in the snow.

Can there be anything more exhilarating? To don bag-lady clothes which no-one will see, and put an extendable lead on the dog, and close the front door to face the ice-frozen night air floating with the most exquisite snowflakes?

To play Boudicca, holding one rein and watching a small scruffy dog lead the way up the lamplit road?

I command all I survey, which is not much, because it’s dark and snowy, but even this limited power is going to my head. Every now and then the dog attempts to stop and christen a lamp-post here, a rubbish bin there. It’s a touch-and-go business. If he runs far enough ahead on his ten-foot extendable lead he can get just enough purchase to cock a leg, before I have pounded past him and all advantage is lost.

I don’t stop. Occasionally, mid-spray, he must abort operations and try for another lamp-post up the road.

Because I am in pursuit. Not of anything on this frosted ice-road: rather, of a goal which I want to meet.

In three weeks I must face trial by swimming costume.

Each year, my family and I have one glorious week away from it all, at a holiday resort, in the dead of December. In line with its sister resorts in the Low Countries, it attempts to simulate something like a beach holiday in the bleak midwinter.

This is does by building a vast dome over a pool, and populating it with lavish pot-plant forests. Middle England flocks there in its thousands.

Even more so at Christmas. When Yuletide calls, Santa sets up his grotto, and Rudolf waits there in a pen for his Big Night Out. There are pantomimes, and magical owl-handling sessions, and Christmas lights wherever you lay your dazzled eyes.

So, while the rest of England makes like Mole in Wind in the Willows, and finds a cosy hole in which to eat as much as possible, we must prepare to bare rather more than we would usually do on this inhospitable little island.

Thus, running is becoming a nightly preoccupation. Tomorrow, the fateful 1st, while little children crow happily over the opening of the advent calendar and its first open door, the sculpting exercises will begin. I am in hot pursuit of an acceptable public face.

It is a time of year when focus is paramount. Everyone has something they are pursuing, whether for themselves or others. Completion of the Christmas shopping; the perfect family celebration; a long-awaited present.

They’re all projects. But pursuit can be more earnest than this.

I’ve been reading a little Shakespeare with Maddie. We have been reading of a great Wizard in pursuit.

But he doesn’t chase his quarry: rather, he uses a great tempest to reel it towards him.

To me, the glittering tale of The Tempest is so very midwinter. It carries all the colour, the enchantment, the glittering fantasy which belongs to Christmas Eve. It has colourful characters which are almost as extreme as those in a mummer’s play: the base and the ethereal, the winsome and the gallant, the wronged and the righted.

Prospero the Wizard is bent on a goal. The storm brings to fruition a project he has had brewing for twelve long years, since he was deprived of his rightful role as Duke of Milan.

All those years ago, it was his brother who was the treacherous one, deposing him and setting him adrift in a boat with his daughter Miranda, who was just three years old.

It is with learning, patience and wisdom that the deposed Duke has made a tiny kingdom of the little island where he and his daughter washed up. He has come to terms with earthy Caliban and limited his basest leanings; and he has freed fleet-footed Ariel to do his bidding. His daughter has grown beautiful and curious; the time is right for justice to be engineered.

He achieves his goal, the wizard I have grown to love.

But that final speech of his that makes me wonder: was the result worth the pursuit? This great powerful sage has spent so long achieving a rightful place for his daughter, putting his history back on those rails once more. But is it irreverent to wonder whether that is anticlimax I can hear from one so able, whose powers are suddenly redundant?

His charms, he tells his listeners, are overthrown, and what strength he has is his own.He wants for spirits to enforce; for art to enchant; and his ending is despair unless those who watch take pity on him.

Such a poignant end to his pursuit.

Today, I arrived home from school and cooked dinner. Maddie and Felix sat at the table . It was sausages, peas and new potatoes, and the children dutifully polished off their greens and carbs.

But it was the sausages that held them in their thrall, because sausages can be made into hot dogs. After tentative requests for bread, dogs were constructed and ketchup liberally applied.

And silence fell upon the gathering. It was so uncharacteristic, it was unnerving.

Eventually I had to say something. “Everyone’s gone quiet, all of a sudden!” I ventured to the preoccupied munching pair.

And Maddie referred me to a little red book.

The red book sits on my bedside table. It is based on wartime make-do-and-mend stiff upper lip British propaganda. It is called Keep Calm and Carry On, by Ebury Press. I got it on holiday. And it is full of the little sayings people have said, which can make life a little easier.

My daughter referred to something said by that French poet, Guillaume Apollinaire: ” ‘Now and then, it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness, and just be happy.’ ”

It took a hot dog to drive the message home. My children were enjoying just such a pause, munching with delighted application. Soon it would be time to take up our pursuits again. But not just yet.

In all the sound and fury of pursuit, preparing for  Christmas or driving towards a life goal, I have this nagging feeling that such pauses are much more than simply a diversion.

They are a necessity.