Who needs the Queen?….

Pete Sixsmith looks back over the year and awards his own New Years Honours (Colin Randall explains the baby in a footnote)….

That’s Christmas over for another year. Hope you got lots of good presents and had a jolly good time in the bosom of your family – or at least in someone’s bosom.

I got some ace presents: a book I first read in 1958, a new shirt, a CD of Julian and Sandy from Round The Horne (although they sound suspiciously like Kevin Keegan and Terry McDermott taking a training session), a book about the French Resistance (Bellion and Laslandes) and the kitschiest alarm clock in the history of the world brought back from Kuwait by a friend of mine who is teaching there. It’s bright blue, in the shape of a mosque and the alarm is a (very) approximate rendition of the muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. Quite something!

On the negative side, there was a truly awful display at Everton which must have had Quinny, and whoever else is in the board room at the moment, doing impersonations of Corporal Jones; my failure to be in The Lounge Inn at Southport when Stevie G (allegedly) whacked the DJ despite being in the resort; and the repeated failure of this and previous Governments to include me in the New Year’s Honours List for services to Sunderland AFC and the persistent brutalising of schoolchildren in the Ferryhill and Chilton areas.

So, what better way to fritter away the dying embers of the Christmas holiday than coming up with my own New Year’s Honours list?

(more…)