It’s famed for its gothic cathedral and swanky shops, but did you know Truro has a new claim to fame? Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the UK’s kinkiest city.

According to podcast Talking Kinky, raunchy Truronians have googled the term BDSM – short for bondage, domination, sadism and masochism - more than anywhere else in England, with 3,074 searches each month per 10,000 people (four times the national average).

Ely, Durham, Ripon and Chichester complete the top five, showing that cathedral cities aren’t averse to a bit of slap and tickle. In contrast, sex toy retailer Lovehoney has Falmouth at the top of the Cornish charts and 27th in the UK overall. Their statistics (sample word: “girth”) made my eyes water.

I learned all this when a colleague in the Cloud asked for Truronians to share their preferences for publication. Having checked my cupboards for whips and shackles and found none, I replied that I was more PMSL than BDSM (note to self: pelvic floor exercises).

I’m no prude, but I find myself increasingly challenged by the sexual content I’m seeing on TV. This is often down to the fact that I’m watching it with a teenager in the room, and neither of us wants to view that sort of thing in each other’s company.

It all kicked off a few weeks ago with The Brits, and a performance by Sabrina Carpenter – not to be confused with her easy-listening sibling duo namesakes. Her song Bed Chem can be summarised thus: fantasising in double- and, quite honestly, single-entendres about a guy she’d like to, ahem, liaise with between the sheets. I particularly enjoyed the Shakespearean section: “Where art thou? Why not uponeth me?”

She was accompanied by a bevy of young female dancers writhing around in next to nothing, before La Carpenter sidled up to a busby-topped “guardsman” and used a phallic microphone to simulate something best left to the imagination.

We were watching this on catch-up at 9.15pm. Basic maths confirmed this would have originally broadcast an hour earlier, pre-watershed. I was aghast that youngsters could be exposed to such tawdry fare (although, granted, much of the innuendo would have passed them by).

Perhaps controversially, in these days of female consent and empowerment, I wondered aloud what kind of example Sabrina, in a position of fame and influence, was setting to all ages and genders by behaving like a strumpet on a family show. I’m well aware that makes me sound like my gran.

Daughter is no massive Carpenter fan by her own admission, but she does live in the 21st century and immediately jumped to her defence. “It’s just you, Mum.” Yes, in the words of Taylor Swift, I’m the problem – it’s me, sexualising everything I see. Maybe I should offer myself up as an example of how Truro is the UK’s kinkiest city, after all.

Or maybe not. A short while afterwards, we tuned in to watch the latest Agatha Christie dramatisation, Towards Zero, in which a group of thoroughly odious characters wind up accused of murder at a country pile. I was naively expecting it to as safe as the stuff you watch during the Christmas holidays when you’re comatose on Quality Street – Poirot, Miss Marple, bigger on plot, clues and 1920s glamour than on gore.

I hadn’t factored in rumpy-pumpy, because I didn’t think that was Christie’s vibe, so I didn’t anticipate a scene involving oral sex on a spiral staircase in full view of other characters.

I interrupted our viewing to ask: why? Surely Christie had not written this, and would be turning in her grave at a screenwriter taking such liberties with her source material? Does every primetime drama now have to be embellished with titillating content thanks to the Bridgerton effect?

Again, Daughter could see no issue other than the acute embarrassment of having to view such bawdy material in the company of both her parents.

To be fair, the kids aren’t exactly naïve, in the same way we weren’t. I was once caught reading Hollywood Wives in biology, and Daughter is into the kind of romantasy fiction that’s advertised as young adult but can get quite steamy in places.

Only the other day, she told me that her PSHE lesson – that’s sex and social education to you and me – was titled “self-examination” and had involved passing fake testicles around the class because, well, give it a few years and the girls will be just as likely to find the lumps as the boys. I howled with laughter at how mortified they must all have been by this, and how much the teacher probably enjoyed that class as a result.

In case you’re wondering, Lovehoney names St Ives as Cornwall’s least kinky town, with a national ranking of 763rd. Very beige. Perhaps I should move there, with my treasured Carpenters CDs.