Here we are. New year, new resolutions to break, most of which probably began early on Sunday morning and involved giving up drinking creme de menthe and tequila cocktails and were broken by Sunday night after the words 'hair of a dog' crept unwillingly into people's minds. Not me, I had a comparatively quiet New Year's Eve. It wasn't even enlivened by those telephone calls you tend to get from family and friends who suddenly want to share their New Year's Eve experiences with you at 2am in the morning. 'Hello Mummy', it used to start, as a less than sober voice rose above a din in the background (their background, not yours) and went on to inform you that they were sorry they couldn't ring dead on midnight but the bar, or restaurant, or hotel, telephone lines were busy. Nowadays it is easier with mobile phones. Then they usually insisted on passing the telephone round everyone else in the party, people you'd never met, who all shouted 'Hello Mummy' and sang the first lines of Auld Lang Syne, after which you could finally get back to bed, by now wide awake. And it doesn't even have to be family and friends. One year I got a slurred 3am call from a man who wanted to speak to his 'auld' mate Harry, or it could have been Barry or Terry or Jerry, and who kept ringing back refusing to believe that old Harry or Barry etc. didn't live there or certainly hadn't lived there for eight years. 'What time is it there?' he kept asking, and I thought he was ringing from abroad but when I asked him he said: 'Plymouth', I had to pull the phone out of the socket to get rid of him eventually. This year the only excitement was when my grandson, who has seen people on television shaking champagne bottles at various sporting events, decided he wanted to see if he could do it to. So he did, and we all toasted 2006 with rather more champagne on the outside than on the inside. Otherwise 2006 arrived with more of a whimper than a bang. It could have been so different in my case had it not been for what forecasters call 'a weather front' cruelly deciding to move just a little bit too slowly across Europe. If it had moved just a little bit faster I too could have been trapped in Prague, as were my daughter and her family, rather than getting up at 5am and driving home from Bristol to get to work on Wednesday morning. They were leaving the day after me, but the weather front got a move on and by the time they got to the airport the snow was feet deep and the departure lounge was knee deep in people trying to get on a plane. As with all airlines it took a long time for someone to actually admit that there wasn't a bat's chance in hell of getting out of there and so at 2.30am, thanks to the help of the lovely Robert at the Ramada Hotel who sent a car, the family were returned to the city centre. Not just for a night but, because of the backlog, they couldn't leave until January 1. Over the next few days we had various reports of the abandoned family's plight, although I have to say it became increasingly hard to be sympathetic with people who were getting three extra days' holiday in fairly convivial surroundings while we were all home with a few bottles of pickled onions, a box or two of Pringles and the inevitable large piece of Stilton which nobody can face any more. I didn't want to eat any of this. I wanted turkey. It's ridiculous really. I tend to avoid turkey all year because it's considered a festive food. Like mince pies, Christmas pudding and brandy butter, it seems sort of all wrong to eat it at any other time. I even avoided having turkey at the two office Christmas lunches and certainly didn't get anything like the big bird and all the trimmings while away. So for New Year I thought 'I'll cook a turkey', only when I went out to find one they had all gone. Flown the coop. Not a turkey to be seen, even in the frozen food cabinets. Where do they go? One minute the shops are 300 abreast in the birds, the next minute you can't find so much as the parson's nose. I had to make do with a loin of pork, which was nice, but not quite the same as turkey and all the trimmings. And the stupid thing is, I don't even like turkey.

Speaking of new year's resolutions, I read that Tony Blair says we all ought to give up complaining and whining because Britain is really a good place to be and we should stop moaning about it. It reminds me of when your mother used to tell you to eat up your plate of congealed tapioca pudding because if you didn't want it there were plenty of little starving Chinese children who did and you were really lucky that you weren't like them. Even at a tender age we knew that was a load of bull... Oh, grow up Tony, it's part of the British character to whinge a lot. We love it. Good times or bad. We may not be very good at verbally complaining about bad service or bad goods but by golly we can certainly reach almost Olympic proportions in the sport of moaning about it afterwards. Along with self deprecation, a trait which no American has ever got the hang of, we have brought moaning and complaining to an art form. And let's face it, whatever rose-coloured specs Tony is looking through, we do have quite a lot to moan about at the moment. Soaring taxes, crime, the destruction of the NHS as we know it. Proposed smoking bans (well, I had to get one personal one in). Being able to have a good old moan somehow makes it better. Tony and all politicians should we grateful. If he was in charge of a South American country. The public might not bother to moan, they'd just go out and buy a Uzi and express their feelings with it. The latest strange idea is to allow the police to arrest anybody for doing anything, or presumably anything that is technically against the law. Things like dropping litter or parking on a double yellow line. As if the police haven't got enough to do already, without hauling somebody in because they dropped a cigarette end in the gutter. And in case they're reading this, I am not a culprit. I usually make sure the cigarette end is out then store it in an empty packet in my handbag which is why on one occasion I found I'd set my handbag alight and smoke was pouring out of it. Embarrassing while leaning over the veggie display in a supermarket. Even more so when I had to grab a bottle of mineral water and pour it onto the conflagration. We can all have a good moan about such stringent new laws, while remembering that there was once a famous sketch on Monty Python, or maybe one of the other satirical television programmes, which saw a police officer arresting people for all sorts of vague and ridiculous crimes, such as walking on the cracks in the pavement, having thick lips and wearing an ugly hat. Who says life doesn't imitate art.