IT HAS been an incredibly boring week.

I’ve hardly been out.

I have not got drunk and been sick on a pavement.

I have not been into any adult shops.

I have not driven my Ford Fiesta over the speed limit.

I haven’t sunbathed naked. Or held up any banks.

I’m trying not to pick my nose or adjust my knickers in public places. And I’m definitely not going to paint a 60ft phallus on the roof of my house.

Now that Google is filming Street View in South Devon, the game is well and truly up.

Now there are street level views, satellite views, CCTV cameras, police cameras and beach cameras. Nobody is going to get away with anything any more and there’s no use even trying. We’re all just going to have to grow up and start behaving ourselves, all the time. Even government ministers, and their husbands.

Ever since I found out that Google has been systematically filming every street in South Devon I’ve been trying to remember what I’ve been up to in the last couple of weeks.

I’m hoping I would’ve noticed a car with a 5ft camera on its roof as I dashed out of the house in my dressing down to put the bins out last Friday morning. But I was in my usual off-to-school panic, so you never know.

As an aside here, while were talking about getting to school late: readers of this column will know that one of the recurring subtexts is my Catholic guilt about what a bad mother I am. Just to be clear, I haven’t actually been a Catholic since I was about 17 (not that I have any problems with Catholicism, or any of the world religions, I think they’re all equally great and all basically saying the same good things so I think it’s divisive, just because I believe in God, to support one particular religion. They’re not football teams. Plus, I found church on Sundays dreadfully dreary as a teenager, although I quite like it again now that I’m getting older. Especially the singing. Glad I got that off my chest).

But, despite all that, I still suffer from the Catholic guilt thing.

So, where was I? Oh yes. I’m a bad mother.

Proof of that is that I’ve just discovered I’ve been taking my seven-year-old to school at the wrong time for about two years.

His school changed the times of the school day after he’d been there for a year, so they start and finish earlier, which was fine by me.

But last weekend I was reading the school letter, and in it was a reminder for new parents of the hours, and I found out that lessons actually start five minutes earlier than I’d thought.

I always wondered why we seemed to be crashing through the school gate with the stragglers, even though I thought we were there in plenty of time. I just assumed the school clock was set a bit fast.

It’s been lovely this week to get in on time, when the playground is still full, and he has time to stand and chat to his friends, rather than running in on his own, last.

We also had homework problems this week. It sounded easy enough. For Easter week his class are decorating eggs. All he had to do for homework was boil an egg. I read his homework book on Friday night and thought ‘easy peasy’.

Parents will know that homework can be ever so slightly fraught when they start making things out of cereal boxes which take up the whole kitchen table.

I have learnt (by my own mistakes, with my older children) that the main thing with homework is not to shout at them. The first lesson, I now know, with the help of hindsight, is to get them to take responsibility and get it in on time.

I may be wrong on this, but I’ve given up being fussy over the detail. I look at his homework and inwardly scream ‘Start again you cretin. You may be only seven, but I expect perfection’ but what I say out loud is ‘Lovely dear. Well done. Try and write a bit more next time’.

So, as last weekend I was also working, I was relieved to find that all he had to do, with my supervision, was boil an egg.

It took us all weekend.

The first egg cracked as it boiled.

The second egg was perfect. His big sister’s friend came in late on Friday night, saw it on the kitchen table, and ate it.

On Saturday we went shopping for more eggs.

We boiled another egg. We wrote his initials carefully on the bottom as instructed. On Sunday, just as I was going out to work, I asked him to wrap it up carefully to take over to his dad’s house and it rolled off the table and the shell smashed.

His fourth egg also cracked as we were cooking it, but by then neither of us really cared. When I asked him how the egg decorating went at school he said it was fine: he’d taped his up with a bit of masking tape.

It’s good to learn early on in life not to sweat over the small stuff.

And so, back to the serious, bigger issue of Google and CCTV cameras taking over the earth.

Having read George Orwell and 1984 in the olden days, when it was still in the future, Big Brother is watching you sounded threatening and sinister.

Now I’m not so sure. When Google Street View first went live in America and in this country it raised a public debate about privacy.

I know there are some very odd, voyeuristic people out there, digital peeping toms. But mostly the only people who are upset about Google Street View are those who get caught being somewhere or doing something they shouldn’t.

I think it’s good that the little white lie is dead. Walter Mitty characters who exaggerate their past get caught out on Facebook and Friends Reunited (hurrah!).

Men going into porn shops get spotted on Street View (tee hee).

Government ministers’ husbands who charge the taxpayer for their dirty movies get caught out (too right).

The best example is the top Australian judge who told one little white lie after he was filmed going six miles an hour over the speed limit. But that one little lie led to another, and now the 70-year-old judge faces two years behind bars.

He was caught after claiming he was driving his mother’s car that day, but CCTV showed her car had never left the garage.

It’s a lesson better learnt very young, when your lies don’t hurt anyone, but leave you feeling foolish and embarrassed. Children lie because they think it will get them out of trouble, not realising that the lie is worse than the original offence. But a 70-year-old judge?

I find myself once again quoting that great sage and seer Marge Simpson, who foretold, at least a decade ago: ‘You know, the courts may not be working any more, but as long as everyone is videotaping everyone else, justice will be done’.

In case you didnt get the reference to the 60ft phallus, 18-year-old Rory McInnes secretly painted a 60ft willy on the roof of his parents’ £1million mansion in Berkshire to see if it would get picked up by Google Earth. It was there for a year before his parents found out after a helicopter pilot sent a photo to The Sun newspaper. They say he’ll have to scrub it off when he gets back from travelling.