Anyone for Christmas leftovers?

Nice hat, Sir!

Twas the night before Christmas (well, almost) and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a m... hang on a second!

Are you telling me that the rodent population not only understand the concept of stirring, but are also familiar with the idea of time and therefore know when Christmas is?! I think we may have vastly underestimated them, and it probably explains why cheese-baited traps aren’t very successful.

It’s that very special time of the year –when you turn the TV on, hopeful that you’re about to get a new Christmas-themed episode of your favourite show, only to discover that it’s a ‘bonus’ outing recorded in August, featuring the ‘best of’ bits you’ve already seen, and some leftover new stuff and outtakes you haven’t (largely because they weren’t good enough to make the original show).

This column is a bit like that... except the ‘best of’ part doesn’t exist. Moving swiftly on...

January: In order to accurately research this column, I have carried out a painstaking review of Twitter trends overnight, dressed only in my underpants. The pants are a personal choice, and unrelated to Twitter. Mostly.

February: Should you ever doubt that the world still is a wonderful place, two small children rushed up to me whilst I was walking along the coast recently, in order to proudly show me the small crabs they’d found. They were absolutely thrilled, and seemed unconcerned about the small matter of them being obviously dead. And one of them was missing a claw. The crab, not the child.

March: Stinky cheese & onion flavour crisps should be banned on trains. Either that, or I take to carrying a bag of pickled onion Monster Munch, thus enabling me to carry out a snack-based counter-strike at will.

April: On the plus side, I could have been trying to write this column in the 1980s, in which case the paper would be so thick with Tipp-Ex it would have snapped when I tried to put it in the envelope.

May: Who decided it was OK for TV news to start showing footage they’ve clearly pinched off YouTube, especially if it’s of old TV programmes? My VHS collection of taped shows featuring Sheena Easton is clearer than... Ah. Awkward.

June: Overheard in a tea-shop in Yorkshire; “Is it proper tea? Not that dreadful Yorkshire stuff?” I’d have supported the waitress in court if she’d punched him on the nose. I almost did, and I don’t even like tea.

Worryingly, having consulted notebooks, scraps of paper and (for reasons I can’t comfortably explain) the corner of a page of Hello magazine, it appears I have more than enough of this stuff making the place untidy to keep this format up for some considerable time.

As it’s the season of goodwill, I won’t make you consume all of it like a plate of sprouts, but there are hopefully enough reasonable bits left on the carcass for Boxing Day.

See you then – I’ll bring the indigestion tablets. Happy Christmas!

This post first appeared as my "Thank grumpy it's Friday" column, in the North West Evening Mail, on the 19th of December 2014. It hasn't appeared on their website so far, but if you want to keep an eye out for it, the place to look is here

As you can see from the picture, they retitled it "Bits you may have missed", which is somewhat misleading as these are very much new bits, largely made up of part formed ideas for columns that I never developed, half-written ones in a notebook that never got finished as they just didn't feel right or weren't strong enough, or what I though were great lines/paragraphs that I jotted down that simply didn't fit anywhere. Still, I'll forgive them the retitle, as they added a Santa hat to my picture.

An unfortunate lack of response to my question about when to submit columns for the Boxing Day and Jan 2nd issues when I submitted last week's column meant I had to ask again when I submitted this one. It turns out there isn't a Boxing Day edition, meaning my sign-off mention of the follow-up column falls rather flat.

Still, I've got a week off from writing, which is quite a novelty. It might not seem like it, but coming up with a 500 word column to a deadline every week, regardless of whether you're busy, ill, on holiday, not in the right frame of mind or simply unable to think of anything, is actually quite tough - especially after 136 of them.

I'm not after sympathy though - I'm lucky to have the chance to do it, and always surprised that sitting in front of the computer with a vague idea (and sometimes a couple of lines in my notebook) results in a column ready to submit in under an hour.

I've half-considered going down the 'vanity' publishing route, and compiling the columns in to a book, but I seriously doubt anyone would be that bothered in obtaining a copy. I guess I could give them away to friends and family, but even that seems a bit self-obsessed, along the "Look at me! I'm a writer! Love me!" lines.

Anyway... Happy Christmas to you. I hope you have a fantastic one, and as there's no column next Friday, have a wonderful New Year too. I might pop in with a blog-only offering before then, of course...

(Today's musical offering is a cassette from October '96 of a CD from Q Magazine, called "Q Decade - The Very Best Of 1986-1996". Interesting selection!)